Bold Words

Day 22: Cannon - Powder - Scarecrow

Since I was a kid, I always dreamed about being rich. Like, making a better life from the stuff I was given. My family owned a farm, which you think would make us money, but we were such a poor farm, we couldn’t even afford a scarecrow. We stuffed clothes with whatever we could find and stuck it out in the field, but the thing was so not intimidating that while the birds were pecking away at our crops, they’d chew away the guard from it too. While my family wasn’t bad at farming, we were just really bad at protecting the things that we grew… and then throw that on top of the drought our hometown had been facing for years… it was a bad time to be a farmer and near impossible to grow anything.

There were so many days where my sister and I went without eating anything because we didn’t even have the money to buy stale bread from the baker in town. Sometimes we’d close our eyes, bring our hands to our lips, and pretend to eat the biggest banquet we could imagine. It would tide us over, but not for long.

Then one day, when I was out in the field working with my dad, I found out I could do something, I could connect with plants—and I know it sounds weird, but let me explain… It was like I’d talk to them and they’d grow at an unbelievable rate. It started out with hopeful words after I planted a few seeds in the ground. I told them they could grow big, then I asked them if they would, because my family was just so hungry. I was desperate and talking to the plants wouldn’t hurt anything, right?

A sprout immediately popped out of the ground before the rest of the plant grew and grew into one of the biggest strawberry bushes I had ever seen. It was the only plant in an acre worth of land and my dad asked where it came from. When I told him, he didn’t believe me and so I told him to watch and I did it again. At first I didn’t think it would work, but as I talked to the plant and asked it to grow, it did that.

Before we knew it, my family had more plants than they knew what to do with. Carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, celery, apples, grapes, strawberries, plums—if you can think of it, we could grow it, regardless of the season. My dad thought it was some weird rule that he never knew as a farmer, but when he tried it, nothing happened. I was put in charge of the fields, just to make sure things grew.

It happened so fast—all the crops. We eventually had an acre of land full of fresh fruits and vegetables. We were able to buy a horse to take it to town and sell it on the market. The banquets that my little sister and I dreamed of were nearly real as we sat down to dinner every night with bread and meat that my mom would turn into some kind of stew or something and then the fresh fruit and vegetables from the garden. It was a modest dinner, but we were well-fed.

As I laid down to sleep that night, my sister giggled on the bottom bunk of our bed.

I responded with my own laugh, “What?”

“I want to live in a castle someday,” she said, giggling again.

I smiled. “I bet we will, someday. Dad’s making a lot at the market and it has to go somewhere. I bet he’ll spend it on a house closer to the city. I bet we’ll get to go to school too. We’ll be able to afford all sorts of things if we lived in the city.”

“I’m so excited! I want to go to school!” she tried to keep her voice down, but her control was failing her.

“We will, we will, but for now let’s go to sleep.”

I knew we could have gone on for hours. I know that even after I said go to sleep, I wasn’t going to. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the possibilities now that we had this money. Now that business was good and it was clearly wasn’t going to stop since we were the only farmers for miles that had any fruit and vegetables for the market—I mean, sure, there were a few others, but from the dark colors to the odd shapes of the fruit’s body, they looked like they were all on their last legs and if eaten, they might be able to kill you. We had a leg up on the competition and it felt good to not struggle for once.