Blog Your Blessings: Corn

Corn. Miles and miles of corn. Tall green corn lining the roadways marked the transition from Connecticut to New York and its strange route numbers, endless winding roads, expansive vistas, large, unpeopled farmhouses, and more corn. Corn glowed in the grey light of a mid-summer afternoon that was for me as lonely as it was warm and quiet and endless.

And it was beautiful. I would roll along and admire a terraced hilltop of corn and wonder what it was like to be up there and then I would find myself exactly there and wondering where I was.

I had printed the Google Maps directions from Woodbury to Woodstock in the faraway other world of New York, and I kept them, crumpled, in my hand the whole way. I followed them to the T, yet I was always sure I had missed a turn, misread a turn as a curve, overlooked a junction, forgotten something. The roads were so long.

Cars would roll by, and I would think, "You know where you are going...and I wish I knew where I were going...and I wish you would stop and tell me if this is right." But they were gone before the thoughts were ever complete. I was alone in the corn and I felt that solitude through and through. I did not completely like it. Perhaps I would not have minded if I were still in Connecticut, but this was a new place. And it felt so foreign.

From time to time I did stop and ask for help reading the directions. The people I spoke to would say, "Jim's going that way; follow Jim," or, "I'm going that way; follow me, and when I turn right at the light, you turn left," or, "Yes, this is Route 199,"....

I found that I was never lost. I never made a wrong turn. I got it right. The people who helped me simply affirmed that, yes, you're on the right road; keep going. The roads seemed needlessly long and sometimes maddeningly circuitous, but they were the right roads, nevertheless. Driving through the corn, I made this discovery: that I had given up on my own judgment, my own sense, too soon. Despite all the evidence showing I was getting it right, things were as they should be, some overwhelming doubt sought to turn me back, to call it a failure, to say You Can't Do This. (In the corn, I discovered a pattern that has directed my life for as long as I can remember. How many times had I given up on myself, my dreams, because that doubt shouted me down?) Strangers and their few words silenced that voice on this Saturday afternoon in the corn.

In the end, when I arrived in Woodstock without the name of the place where I would find my friend, two old friends would provide the instructions to get me the last 60 yards of this journey. They would tell me I got it right and to go a little more to make it right, completely right. And I would.

And I would laugh at myself that I required a committee of strangers and a few friends to help me go the whole right road to the exact right place. I laugh again, happy now to know it really is possible to get there. Happy, too, that I didn't go it alone after all.

Blog Your Blessings