The main thing I remember about this book: Aunt Pol.
Which brings me to this month’s book in my Year in Re-Reading: Pawn of Prophecy, by David Eddings, Book One of the Belgariad.
Nine year-old fantasies are chaste fantasies.) (At the end of which I suspected we might kiss, though I wasn’t sure why. That pretty girl from two towns over with a bob in her hair who you see at church every Sunday? She’s a princess who’s one burning castle away from setting out on an epic journey with you. You pretend the hills beyond the bean field are magic mountains where goblins stalk and treasure is hid. (“Jesus, son,” my dad said when he saw the carnage, “we grow that corn to sell, you know.”). When you’re a farm kid with a big imagination and it’s a million miles to the city, you do things like make a sword out of a shovel to fell stalks of corn that serve as stand-ins for marauding orcs. You spend your days longing to be on an epic journey somewhere like this: The farm off Lake Alice Rd, Scotts Bluff County, Nebraska, 1980 Safety regulations? What safety regulations? (To say nothing of the legions of migrants, always Hispanic and invariably polite, who washed over the country each summer for $9-an-acre work.)īut of course this isn’t about big evil agribusiness multinationals or bragging about eating organic food (people on the Internet do this, if you can believe such a thing) or ignorant journalists who wouldn’t know a windrower from a one-pass. This was in the day before the magic of RoundUp (TM), when farmers routinely mixed up a witch’s brew of pesticide chemicals using their own home-brew recipes, and it still wasn’t enough to keep the weeds from conquering whole fields. etc. etc.įor me, the discussion is intensely personal because I spent whole chunks of my childhood summers with a hoe, amongst endless rows of soybeans, bandana draping my neck, and bottle of water perched in the dirt on one end of the field, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with weeds. Got in a minor Twitter brouhaha the other day about GMO and Roundup™ and the evils of Monsanto, etc. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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