Harvest

"The Praying Mantis laid an egg case!" Trinidad pointed to the foamy, scalloped oval of brown hanging from the side of the enclosure that held his most recent captive. Word got out, children came, and this symbol of hope in the spring hung like a rainbow bridge from the first frost of autumn.

I picked field beans yesterday in the rain, wool felt hat pulled low. Some pods bulged like pregnant women, proud and pale. Others had grown thin-skinned and their burden pressed through damp membranes like the entrails of a carcass left to rot. To take the heart of a plant, all it has known that has served -- this seed is a gift. Let me be reminded of death in all that is given.

The Mantis is much thinner now.

I have given thanks in times of joy so great, oneness so whole, love so ecstatic, that I thought there might be nothing of me left behind. I have given thanks for what was mine after the storm. In this moment, I give thanks for beauty, such beauty, in a field of corn, beans, and squash under the first heavy rains of the season.

There is more. My children sit sorting beans into piles, wondering which color will be revealed as they crack each pod open. It is a game, passing tomorrow back and forth in baskets and bowls, sometimes spilling. My children remind me that fury is not necessary in the gathering of food for winter. Play is just as important -- the bloom before the bearing.

Multi-colored corn hangs across our living room wall behind the wood stove. It is just a portion of what we have been gifted. Each child in our neighborhood will choose their favorite to take home. Every hue of the bejeweled ears leave me breathless. Sometimes, even with them hanging so nearby, I cannot bear to look.

"I found last year's egg case in the front yard!" Trinidad proudly holds up the dull, empty casing that he purchased with his own money at a local garden store last March. The mantis in his care now surely knew its walls.

Sometimes a moment sits still on the head of a pin to be held and examined. Sometimes it stretches out in all directions, and I cannot find myself at all.

The bridge across this divide shortens every autumn.