Upon This Forty Acres | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Upon This Forty Acres | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jim McWhinnie
05/19/09
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Simply a two story, white clapboard farmhouse, sitting in the midst of a few tidy, well-worked field, it was not much more, my boyhood home. In that place, in those times, these family farms were scattered everywhere. Nothing all that special about such farms and their houses, except, of course, to the souls who lived within them.

Grandad had long ago took the time to place in the front room a window three sashes wide. Six panes of glass above, six panes below, thirty-six in all. I know there were thirty-six little squares of window glass for I learned my counting by counting them. Beyond the window, the porch swing would sometimes stir with ghosts, back and forth, back and forth. And there were times, when the winds coming off the fields had gone on by, when the swing would wait patiently suspended by its chains. Sometimes a bluebird, sometimes a wren, would stop and take a turn. This is how I know that even birds do have their weight and can cause a swing to stir.

But it was beyond the swing, beyond the railing of the porch, beyond the stone well that anchored what served as our front yard, that a slow, slow drama did tell of life. Forty acres of flat, rich bottom land, free of stone and so providential in its way, this was the stage upon which time portrayed itself.

Before the thaw of spring, that field was a glistening, sparkling carpet of snow. For something made of stuff so very cold, the stuff of snowmen and snow forts, the canvass for angel portraits four foot tall, that snowy field looked warm from inside my window. It looked like it would be warm to cuddle beneath its cotton down.

But after the thaw, when the winter had melted away that field looked like barren wasteland, crusty, unbroken, stubbled with the straw of the harvest past and gone. For most that empty field looked liked utter desolation, but for a farmer assured by the passing of many seasons, the field looked like hope.

Before the planting time, the field appeared as loneliness, maybe abandoned. But after the faithful rows were turned by a farmer and his plow, the field took on a certain gracious beauty as if long tresses combed by a loving lady’s hand. Worked and worked again, the springtime soil prepared itself for its purpose, a purpose that it knew quite well.

Before the harvest, the field would become a gently rolling fabric of pale and rustic gold. It had the look of softness, a softness more soft than its bristly reality. But after those late summer days of golden glory, the harvesters would come. Filling the first air of autumn with chaff and dust, the harvesters would go out and back. Filling the empty barns with wheat and barley, the harvesters would go out and back.

After the harvest, the field would look spent to me, almost tired. Then just before the winter came, the birds would pack their bags, gleaning bits and pieces off that field. And after this, the snow would fall.

I am thankful that God in His artistic understanding of how time courses through human souls, filled our living with the passing seasons, the before and after times in this long eternity.

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