Corn

My brother Fred went to Oklahoma in the late 70s, when he was 20, to work for Aunt Lyddie's husband Amos on their ranch near the town of Thomas, west of Oklahoma City and north of Interstate 40. Then he followed the wheat harvest for years and had lots of other adventures and somehow ended up in Corn, as far south of I40 as Thomas is north.

I think it was six years ago that he married Loraine who was also from Corn. They live in Loraine's grandma's old house.

Corn sits in the middle of rolling wheat fields. As you follow the highway west, you suddenly come upon a steel grain bin that says "Welcome to Corn," at the top of a small rise, and when you see that warm welcome you can't see a blessed thing of any town, and it looks like Corn consists of this grain bin. Which is oddly creepy, like it's a taste of things to come.

Because Corn is disappearing. Or dying. It was started as a settlement of staunch Mennonites of the Loewen and Friesen varieties. There's still a big Mennonite Brethren church in the middle of town. In its heyday Corn had over 500 people and served a wide swath of rural area.

Then the farmers started moving to towns, and the population got older, and young people moved away, and the ones that stayed didn't have the big families of longer ago.

So now you get this feeling of a beautiful, close-knit community that is on its way out.

The feed mill is gone and the metal bins are all rusty. The bank is closed, the hardware store, the grocery store, the insurance place. This is the first year that there's no public school in town. The Baptist church is down to about seven old people. The newspaper closed down when the publisher got too old.

We walked to the south end of town where there's town on one side of the street and fields on the other. The wheat fields look green, but Fred and Loraine said this drought is the worst since even before the 30s, and there's no way to save this wheat crop. If the stalks form heads at all, they will be empty. Maybe they can cut it for straw, Fred said, but not today. It would all blow into the next county.

The town is dotted with too many real estate signs. The dilapidated house across the street, along with the generous lot, could probably be bought for $8000, said Fred.

And yet, it's a wonderful town. The nursing home is huge and modern and said to be the best in the state. And Corn Academy at the other end of town, a Christian boarding school, the second oldest of its kind in the country, is going strong.

And the people are warm and friendly and midwestern. As we walked down the street in the summery wind, we had to stop and chat with everyone. We stopped by Loraine's sister's and saw the new puppies. The guy way down the street in his wheelchair was discussed, along with what people say about his new wife. There was a sense of camaraderie that seemed unusual even for the Midwest.

(Or maybe it was just Fred and Loraine, and who they are.)

Fred and Loraine seemed to know who lives in each house, what they're up to, what's happening with the house if it's empty.

Their neighbor talked about the most efficient way to water the lawn and came by with a loaf of fresh bread.

Fred told me about the neighbor on the other side, an incongruous transplant from the East Coast who fancies herself far above her Republican neighbors and insists on buying "green" products on her daily trips to Walmart, 13 miles away. She hauls out two big trash cans, full, every week, says Fred, and feeds canned cat food to the roving tom cat.

But I'm sure that if she got the flu, Loraine would take her some hot soup.

So life goes on in Corn, and old people go to the nursing home, and neighbors watch out for each other, and the wind blows and blows, like it's trying to blow that little town right off the prairie, like it had never been there in the first place.