Excerpt from Singing Valleys: The Story of Corn
In April, under the spring rains, the passive cornfields lie on the countryside in sodden brown patches. Ribbons of darker brown - roads, rutted by the frost and by wagon wheels - bind them to the scattered farmhouses and barns. The sky drops down until it seems to smother the earth. All the bright, song-filled space, the home of the bee, the meadow lark and the hawk, is filled with drifting mist.
At this season the country is lonelier than at any other time of the year.
The towns feel this. They draw away from the farmlands and huddle about the white-spired churches. The houses press shoulder to shoulder, turning their backs on the pitiful stretches of naked, wet earth, as men turn their eyes from sight of a drowned man.
But late in April a day comes when the low-hanging mists lift and draw together into a black ball. There is a roll of thunder, followed by a vicious downpour of rain. It rains harder then than on any day since the break-up of winter. Dusk draws in, night falls; the downpour goes on. The long fingers of the rain beat on the tin and shingled roofs. They flatten the cornlands to a muddy brown sea.
Sometime between midnight and dawn the rain stops, and it is very still. The stillness wakes the men who have been waiting for this to happen. They stumble out of bed and pull aside the curtains and peer out at the flooded world. In the east a pale sun is struggling through the clouds. It strikes across the slimy fields. A crow, hunched on the ridge-pole of a barn, flies down the shaft of light and pecks at a lump of wet earth.
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