by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
To Jesus’ parable of the sower, Sunday’s gospel, I bring my own experience of counting on the promised yield of a field of soybeans. When I was 12, Dad asked if I thought I could cultivate corn. I was sure I could. So he suggested we try a round together.
Never did I try harder. I kept the tractor moving straight down the rows, digging out the weeds between the rows, but safely missing the corn. Dad was impressed. He had hooked me into a job I did for the next six summers, cultivating 500 acres of corn and beans three times through.
The year I graduated from high school I needed to earn more money than the $3 a week Dad then paid me. I needed $400 for my college tuition alone. Dad proposed a deal. If I worked for him, he would give me 30 acres of soy beans. He would supply the seed, harvest the beans, and give me the income for college. I should make at least $400, maybe $600.
The 30 acres lay on the west side of the quarter section my Irish great-grandfather Dennis Mitchell homesteaded when he mustered out of the Massachusetts infantry after the Civil War. I had my turn farming this light clay soil some 90 years later.
Soy beans sprout fast like garden beans. Their first two leaves are shiny nubs on either side of a short stem. I remember stopping the tractor on an early June morning to shake the dirt off plants I accidentally covered and hoped no one saw me being so inefficient.
The beans grew well in June and July into long leafy hedges. But no more rain came and the August sun beat down, turning the green leaves brown and choking the promised yield of each stalk just at the time when the plants were forming pods. I hated to drive past the field. In the end I had only $265 toward my college tuition.
However, the promise of the bean field did not end with the poor yield. As a first year college student, I took writing. The professor urged us to write from our own experience. I wrote about my 30 acres of beans. The story became the first I ever had published; it opened up a new field to cultivate. The ultimate yield of my farming was more than beans; it was words, stories, and the beginning of my lifelong work as a writer.
- What disappointing yields have you experienced?
- What unexpected yields have surprised you?