Forty Dozen Before Noon
Part One: The Coffee Can
The receipt was on her kitchen counter.
I saw it on a Sunday afternoon in late August, when I stopped by my mother-in-law’s farmhouse to drop off a pan of zucchini bread. She was out on the back porch snapping green beans into a dishpan. I set the bread on the counter next to the bread box, and that’s when I saw the slip of paper tucked under the edge of her sugar canister.
Pink. Carbon copy. The kind the feed store still uses because old Mr. Hartley refuses to buy a computer.
Hartley Feed and Seed. Account: D. Lund. Paid in full. $2,400.00.
I knew that number.
I knew it the way you know your own phone number, or your kids’ birthdays, or the price of a gallon of milk. I’d watched it grow in a coffee can on my kitchen windowsill all summer long.
Twenty-four hundred dollars.
That was my kids’ money.
My name is Amy Lund. I’m thirty-nine years old.
I live on twenty acres outside New Bremen, Ohio, in the flat, green farm country of the western part of the state. The land out here is so level you can watch your neighbor’s dog run away for two days. Corn and soybeans in every direction. Red barns. Church steeples. Grain elevators standing up against the sky like giants.
I’m a dental hygienist in Celina, three days a week. My husband, Jeff, manages the parts department at a tractor dealership in Minster. We have two kids.
Caleb was twelve that summer. Tall and skinny, with his father’s sandy hair and his father’s habit of saying very little and noticing everything. He’d started reading Louis L’Amour westerns at nine and never stopped.
Hannah was nine. Small, freckled, fierce. She had opinions about everything and announced all of them. She wanted to be a veterinarian, a professional softball player, and the president, in that order.
That summer, they wanted one thing.
To earn their own money.
Part Two: The Stand
My mother-in-law is Deanna Lund. Everyone in town calls her Dean. She’s sixty-eight.
She lives on the home place, two miles south of us on Kuether Road. A hundred and sixty acres that have been in the Lund family since 1893. Jeff’s father, Walt, farmed it until he died of a stroke three years ago. Since then, Dean has rented out most of the ground to a neighbor and kept twelve beef cows and a few acres for herself.
And every summer, for as long as anyone can remember, she’s grown sweet corn.
Three acres of it. In the field along the county road, right in front of the house. Peaches and Cream, mostly, and some Silver Queen for the late season. People drive out from Celina and Wapakoneta and St. Marys just to buy Dean Lund’s sweet corn.
She sells it from a little wooden stand at the end of her driveway. Walt built it in 1981. Painted white with a green roof. A hand-painted sign hangs from the front, faded but still readable.
DEAN’S SWEET CORN. $5 A DOZEN.
Dean’s knees got bad two summers ago. She couldn’t stand at the stand all day anymore. Couldn’t do the early-morning picking.
So in May, she called Jeff.
“Do you think the kids would want to run the stand this summer?” she asked. “They’re old enough now. Caleb especially.”
We had her over for supper that Sunday to talk about it.
I remember it clearly. Roast chicken and mashed potatoes and Dean’s own canned green beans from last summer. Iced tea in tall glasses. Dean sitting at the end of our kitchen table, where she always sits when she comes over.
She laid out the plan.
The kids would pick in the morning while it was cool. Run the stand from seven to one, six days a week. She’d show them how to pick, how to bag, how to count change.
“And whatever you make,” she said, looking right at Caleb and Hannah, “you keep.”
Hannah’s eyes went wide.
“All of it?” she asked.
“All of it,” Dean said. She smiled. “It’s time you two learned the value of hard work. Can’t learn that if somebody takes your money.”
She reached across the table and shook Caleb’s hand. Then Hannah’s. A real handshake. Firm.
“Deal?” she said.
“Deal,” the kids said together.
I remember that handshake. I remember the iced tea sweating on the table. I remember Jeff smiling at his mother like he hadn’t seen her smile in a long time.
There was no paper. Of course there wasn’t. You don’t write up a contract with your grandmother over roast chicken.
It was family.
Part Three: Five in the Morning
They started the first week of July.
Every morning, I’d set my alarm for four-forty-five. I’d stand in the kids’ doorways and flip on the lights. Caleb would groan. Hannah would bounce out of bed like it was Christmas.
By five, they’d be in the truck. By five-ten, I’d drop them at the end of Dean’s lane. They’d walk out into the corn in the gray morning light with five-gallon buckets, and I’d sit in the truck for a minute and watch them go.
You pick sweet corn in the cool of the morning. That’s the rule. Dean taught them that.
“Corn picked at noon tastes like cardboard by supper,” she said. “Sugar turns to starch in the heat. You want it cold off the stalk.”
So they picked in the cool. Down the rows, bent over, checking the silk. Brown and dry means ready. Green and wet means wait. Squeeze the ear. Feel for the fat kernels all the way to the tip. Pull down and twist.
By seven o’clock, they’d have forty or fifty dozen in the bins at the stand.
Caleb did the heavy work. He hauled the full buckets from the field, two at a time. He stacked the ears in bundles of thirteen, a baker’s dozen, the way Dean always did. He kept the stand swept and the bins full.
Hannah ran the money.
The cash box was an old green metal one, the kind with a little key and a handle on top. Walt bought it in 1981 along with the lumber for the stand. It sat on a shelf at the back of the stand, a little too high for a nine-year-old.
So Hannah stood on a bucket.
An overturned five-gallon pickle bucket from the restaurant supply store. She stood on it every morning for nine weeks, counting change, making small talk with customers, telling everyone who stopped that her grandma grew the best corn in Auglaize County.
They worked six days a week. Seven to one. Monday through Saturday. Sundays off because Dean said the Lord rested, so they could too.
Rain or shine. Heat or not. July in western Ohio can hit ninety-five with humidity so thick you can drink it. Some days the cars came one after another. Some days they sat for an hour without a single customer.
Five dollars a dozen.
At one o’clock, Dean would come out of the house and walk down to the stand. She’d count the cash box. She’d write the number in a little spiral notebook. Then she’d put the money in an envelope and hand it to Hannah.
“Good day,” she’d say. Or, “Slow day. Tomorrow’ll be better.”
Every afternoon when I picked them up, Hannah would climb into the truck holding that envelope like it was made of gold.
When we got home, the kids would go straight to the kitchen windowsill.
There was an old Folgers coffee can there. Red, with a plastic lid. Caleb had cut a slot in the lid with my kitchen scissors. Hannah had decorated it with stickers. Unicorns and baseballs and a sticker from the dentist that said I WAS BRAVE TODAY.
On a strip of masking tape on the front, in Caleb’s careful handwriting, it said: CALEB & HANNAH — CORN MONEY.
They’d count it every night after supper. Spread it out on the kitchen table. Fives and tens and twenties and a few ones. Hannah would sort the bills into piles by size. Caleb would write the total on a piece of notebook paper taped to the side of the refrigerator.
July 8 — $85. July 9 — $140. July 10 — $210.
By the end of July, it was over a thousand.
They had plans for that money.
Caleb wanted a used compound bow for deer season. A good one. He’d been looking at one on Facebook Marketplace for months. Three hundred and fifty dollars.
Hannah wanted to go to softball camp at Wright State in Dayton. A week in August next summer. Four hundred dollars.
The rest was going into savings. College, maybe. Or a car someday. Caleb had already done the math on how much he’d have by sixteen if they did this every summer.
