Lessons from the Corn

"The corn has tasseled," my mom comments as we drive past the neighboring farms on our way to town.

I look at the corn. Tassels are swaying above the emerald green stalks standing in attention like soldiers in the field. As a desert dweller for the past 26 years, I haven't spent much time thinking about the life cycles of corn.

Unlike my mom. She has watched the corn grow outside her kitchen window in the two-story farmhouse where she came in 1964 with my dad and three young children under the age of five and one more child, just the first seed beginnings growing inside.

For 46 years she watched the corn. The planting. The young stalks pushing through the dark earth, reaching for drinks of sunlight and rainwater while four children stretched tall in the Minnesota summer. Each year the tassels arrived to pollinate the corn ears, readying the plant for harvest as the kernels grew ripe and yellow.

Planting.

Growing.

Maturing.

Harvesting.

Through the cycles of the corn my parents raised a family that grew up and moved to all corners of the United States, but in the summer, we return with our children and children's children to the home that is surrounded by corn.

But those days might be ending.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 says,

There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven...a time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted.

My parents are thinking of uprooting and replanting to a smaller home in town. Of sorting through 50 years of possessions and starting new memories in a new location.

Today, I stand at the window of my parent's home and watch the corn. Just like my mother. I walk to the field and ask my daughter to take my picture.

I want to remember the lessons learned here.

That life is seasons.

I too raised four children that have grown tall, but under the Arizona sun. My two daughters will be at the same college in the fall, one a freshman, the other a senior. My youngest has just gotten his driver's license. He has sprouted four inches in the past year. A stalk towering over me. When did he stretch beyond my grasp?

My oldest son and his wife are having a baby in August, our first grandson. A new seed sprouting. A new beginning.

I wish I could slow down time. To allow some changes and not others. But that is not the lesson I hear while I stand in the corn.

There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven...a time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted.