It’s a John Mayer kind of night.

I am totally content right now laying in my bed listening to John Mayer’s music while searching other blogs. I can’t sleep or I don’t want to sleep, even though I will be awake early for church. I’m not anxious about moving on Monday, even though my room is strewn with unpacked paraphernalia. And I’m not even upset at myself for the usual things, even though I haven’t done anything to remedy any of them.

So that’s all I have for tonight.

Harvest at the Pierson Farm

Tomorrow my family is celebrating joint occasions, my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary and my grandpa’s 80th birthday. Grandma and Grandpa (Mike and Marilyn) Pierson are my only remaining grandparents as my father’s parent’s (Irene and Bernard Westhoff) have both passed on. I love both sides of my family so much and we’ve been blessed with many cousins and aunts and uncles.

These family occasions always make me reminisce about the past and tonight I caught myself thinking about growing up visiting the Pierson farm near Wiley, CO. About this time of year all the cousins would flock to the little farm that Grandpa and Grandma made their home so many years ago. August was harvest time for Grandpa’s sweet corn, and we all gladly helped where we could. We had quite an operation going, too. Grandpa and a couple uncles and hired hands would patrol the field, picking ears by hand off the tall stalks and sending them back to the house in 5 gallon buckets. There, Jeff and Ryan and some of the other older cousins would chop off both sides of the cobs and once again toss them in buckets. Next, the cobs went to Daniel, Megan, the Peecher girls and my older sister (the “middle” cousins) for shucking and removing the silks (sometimes I got to help with this too, and that meant only one thing, I was growing up!). This is where Grandma finally got her hands on the corn as she boiled every single one for just the right amount of time. As I was so young most of the time at the farm, my duties came last. I helped take the freshly boiled corn and cut the kernels off the cob for freezing (we couldn’t eat all of it in one night, no matter how hard we tried). Sometimes, when you got lucky, the kernels would strip off the cob in giant slices, still connected at the bases. That was the pinnacle, that was what I worked for. Seeing that knife slice perfectly down the side of the cob like butter as the kernels peeled away like a strip of sod was the same as seeing a beautiful car cut through the summer air to my young eyes. Of course, not a single strip of kernels ever made it into the plastic freezer bags. No, I devoured those sweet slices as soon as they hit the cutting pan. They were too perfect for plastic baggies and freezing, they deserved to be eaten immediately.

I’ll write more tomorrow night about my grandparents, for tonight, I just wanted to record my memories of those wonderful times on the farm… God Bless.