It’s Rice Harvest Time in Missouri

Looking up at October’s full moon, still bright in the predawn light, it is impossible not to think about the activity that goes on across the Midwest during harvest season.  For me, there is a connection that goes back to the first time that I witnessed a wheat harvest under a blue moon in the Hartsburg bottoms.  A quarter of a century has passed since then, but the memories of that autumn harvest are as vivid as ever.

Cathy Salter

Kit and I had driven my Chevy pickup across the Hartsburg Bottoms to witness the wheat harvest under a full moon. This is the scene we came upon that evening—

“After a long search across the Bottoms trying to find the lights of Orion Beckmeyer’s red International Harvester combine, we ended up on the narrow road that runs atop the levee, looking at fields of wheat to our left and the Missouri River creeping in on the wetlands to our right.  ‘Now I can officially say that I’ve driven my Chevy on the levee,’ I joked, ‘but how in the heck am I ever going to get us turned around?’  It was then that we saw the lights of Orion’s combine and spotted a beaten path leading from the levee down to our friend.  In a field of freshly cut wheat the color of a harvest moon, we parked and walked toward the lights flooding from the giant combine coming directly at us.  

~ Read the rest in today’s Journal ~