His Eyes Were on the Starling

Mom and pop always had a fairly large and well taken care of, vegetable garden every summer, for as long as I could remember. In the late 1940s and beyond, when my parents were raising us 4 kids, it behooved them to raise as much produce from our garden as was feasible, in-order to help keep a full menu on the dinner table, without breaking the bank. Mom's expertise at canning several items that we raised in our garden helped immensely, in always having an adequate supply of 'wholesome', canned food on the four shelves at the bottom of the basement stairs.

One of the most abundant of mom's canned items was that of sweet corn. The amount of garden space relegated to sweet-corn was usually quite large and one year in particular was quite memorable. It was right about the middle of July and the rich green-leaved sweet-corn was fully knee-high or slightly higher. We had 4 beautiful rows of robust looking sweet-corn stalks, that ran the full 50 foot length of our garden this one year, that everyone in our family could rightly be proud of. And then disaster struck. A severe summer rain storm blew in with drenching rains and 50 mph winds for over a half an hour. When the storm eventually, blew on past, several of us ventured outside to survey the damage. We hurried out to the garden to see how things had 'weathered the storm'. One look at our sweet-corn and our hearts sank immediately. Every single corn plant that previously had been reaching for the sky was now flat on the ground with most of their roots exposed. It looked like our entire crop of sweet-corn that year was history. All of that hard work was now; ‘down the drain’.

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Immediately, she called Carole and me over to her and she started 'barking' military-like commands. "This is what we will do", she told us, as she knelt down and showed us how to gently tip the horizontal corn plants back up to the vertical position. Next, she scraped huge hand-fulls of the still soft mud all around the roots of the plants until they were sufficiently stabilized enough to stand on their own. She then added a couple of extra handfuls of mushy soil around the base, just for good measure. She quickly showed us with a couple of demonstrations, then had each of us start on our own row. Mom worked like a trooper but every 10 minutes or so, she had to run in the house to check on our 2 younger brothers, Bruce and Tom. Mom helped as much as she could but she had Carole and me finish our rows, the remainder of her row and the 4th row as well. We must have worked nearly non-stop for about 3 hours or more.

We finally had all the 4 rows of sweet corn standing erect and packed quite firmly in place. All we could now do was pray and wait. And my parents did plenty of both. With-in a week or so, we could see that the soil around each corn plant was nearly normal, each plant was standing ’stately’ erect and each stalk was staying a rich green color and starting to get a bit taller, as well.

We checked on our corn crop repeatedly every few days and saw that every single corn plant that we had replanted, that day, had retaken root and continued to grow. Not only was our entire sweet corn crop saved that year but provided a near 'bumper crop', additionally! What a blessed, wise and wonderful mom we had. She was a ‘trooper’, not a quitter. And it was an excellent lesson for all of our family, of the Blessed power of prayer, as well!