Planting

     So why is this a good job? Simply this: because walking along slowly row by row, I get to find some remarkable things turned up by the plow, disc, and subsoiler since the last time we worked that field. It's not buried treasure, just mundane objects of ordinary lives long since gone away, but it never fails to make my heart flutter to find these things and think about how they got to be in my bean field.

     Here's a shoe from a workhorse. Did he lose it while in harness, working rows just like we're doing now, or did it fly off when he kicked up his heels in a frolic after being turned loose from a day of labor? His name could have been Hank or Bob or perhaps Prince. Maybe HER name was Dolly or Kate or Babe. Frederick County was once such a center of devotion to Percheron draft horses that some referred to it as "Little La Perche" after the region in France where the breed originated. I don't have to imagine too hard to see a team of dapple gray giants ahead of me instead of that little orange tractor.

     What's this? Another large iron shoe, but the shape of this one is different: it's a mule shoe. That's no surprise, and it gladdens my heart as a mule lover to know that there were long-eared inhabitants on the farm way before I had my own Jack, Gussie, Nellie, and Dee. I hope that farmer from way back when had the sense not to put the horse and mule in harness together. Poor horse to be worked in tandem that way! The mule would have worked him to death.

     A little brown bottle catches my eye: a whiskey miniature. Maybe old, maybe not, but I like to think that it is. Long days bouncing along in the cast iron seat of a horse-drawn implement sure could jostle the joints, knot the back, crick the neck. In the days before mass-produced, child-resistant, shrink-wrapped modern pain relievers on every supermarket shelf, you just had to find your own ways to deal with pain.

     Here's something that's definitely not old: a rounded cup of iron, not rusted at all, with fresh grease inside. Whoops! A piece has fallen off one of the wheels of the planter. I run up the row and give it to Paul.

     Some neighborhood boys came around last week to ask whether they could go metal detecting on the farm. I pointed to this very bean field and told them that their best chance of finding something were in this worked-up ground rather than in the pastures or hayfields. They chattered excitedly about the Union Army camps that were known to have been in this area in 1862; they'd heard the soldiers had been paid in gold!

     I didn't say a thing. Even if they had been paid in gold, they likely would have spent it long before it ever had a chance to get lost from their pockets. I showed them what I had found in the field last year: horse shoes, an axehead, a piece of a singletree, a green bottle. They weren't much impressed, I'm afraid - my treasure was simply junk to them. I suppose it's a matter of perspective.

     No matter where I walk on this farm, I always wonder: what's sleeping in the ground beneath my feet? The answer: everything that came before, friend.