Packing Corn

Last year I worked at a farm packing corn. Another homeschool family ran the farm, and their children and hired teens were pretty much all of the people packing the corn. It was a lot of fun, except for having to get up at 4:30 to get down to the farm at 5:00.

--For those of you who don't have corn packing experience, I'll tell you how it works, at least at the farm I worked at. They had a big old corn picking machine that harvested the corn and dumped it into a wagon hooked to the back of it. When whoever was running the machine had filled the wagon they would take another one out and the rest of us would pack the corn into bags from the wagon. They had these large hemp? sacks which needed to have exactly 60 ears of corn. We counted them out five at a time and threw away all the bad ears.
--In case you were wondering, no, we couldn't wait until later in the day to pack corn. Around six or seven o'clock a couple of trucks would drive up to pick up corn for their farm stands so they could sell fresh during the day. After we were all done packing, the rest of the bags would be packed onto pallets and driven out to other stores. It was so much fun, (but also hard work) we got to see beautiful sunrises over corn fields. The foggy days were pretty too, everything was so quiet and still and heavy... almost ethereal.
--We had to go out whatever the weather, rain or shine. Usually it was nice, at worst cloudy. But every once in a while it was drizzling and miserable. Once it was POURING, and I gave up trying to stay dry. Once you gave up it was kind of fun, it wasn't cold just humid, which was surprisingly for that early in the morning. We all got pretty much soaked to the skin and a bit muddy, packing the wet corn in the dark during the rain. They had a tractor with its lights on so we could see the wagon to pack the corn. Actually, I think that is one of the most memorial times I had packing corn. Go figure, the time I remember the most was the time I got soaking wet and uncomfortable. It wasn't half so pleasant at the time, but I liked it how many people came to pack so we could get it over with quickly. Sometimes there were just three or four of us at the most, but that time there had to be around ten-twelve or maybe a bit more, trying to get it over with.
--Getting up and working packing corn at too-early-o'clock in the morning gave rise to lots of interesting conversations. And puns. Very corny puns and jokes. Such as "I'm stalking you" (this usually was accompanied with hitting the others with a corn stalk). There was also many "ear" puns, most of which I can't remember... "Have an ear" (Throw a rotten ear at the person). Funnily enough, one of the girls was actually going to "Cornell" college in the fall. Really. She was.
--After we were done packing sometimes us teens would go down the road and jump right off the street into a little pond and play in the stream. You could crawl right through the pipes that carried the water under the road. Somebody brought boards and we boarded up one side of the tunnel once to get the water level to rise. Then we tried to ride boogy-boards through it. It worked surprisingly well, although I seem to recall that someone scraped something and drew blood... an arm or something.
--Once we actually went and played on the playground. I haven't had so much fun at a playground since I was a kid (and NO, we didn't deface anything!!!). Okay, okay, so I'll degrade myself by telling you that we, yes, a bunch of teens... although we were/are homeschooled :D, played tag.... we did have a rule that you couldn't go off the playground equipment, though. To make it more challenging.

Anyways, thank you for letting me reminisce. Even though I didn't ask you.

P.S. Did you know raw corn tastes awesome? It's nice and sweet and juicy... I still think it's better cooked, but honestly, you should try some raw sweetcorn sometime. That was another quirk of working packing corn... you got to take home fresh leftover corn.