Country Life
BY IAN NIALL THE year of the short corn my grandfather talked about was one when winter stayed late and summer was too brief. I remember making the old man frown by suggesting that it was also a year when the potatoes didn't grow because he didn't plant any. I had not grasped the significance of a bad harvest then. The spells of rain and wind we have been hav- ing recently make me wonder about harvest in my part of the world. It lookS like another wet one, and farmers have already bemoaned poor hay and the increasing cost of seed. There is a facetious saying, 'We never died a winter yet,' which, shorn of a modern glibness about everything, is really a declaration of faith—if it rains there will be good pasture and if the sun shines, garnered corn. This evening 1 walked up the road in a drizzle of rain to look at fields of corn and stooks round about us, and how well I recalled the hardship of har- vest and rain in my boyhood, when the labour itself was a sort of prayer. Here was the familiar sight of an old jacket draped on the binder seat and the canvas sheets of the machine blanketed in sheaves to keep them dry. Perhaps tomorrow the sun would shine and bless the scene and desolation would vanish, the binder be at work again and the pigeons flight across the valley from one group of trees to another.
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