(no subject)
Taking the Measure
by Joel Sartori
Originally aired on Sunday Morning (CBS) on November 20, 2005
I'm from Nebraska. It's a pleasant place, really. People wave as you pass them on the highway. Nobody honks if you're late coming off a green light. They still know how to make great pies from scratch: even the crust. Most importantly though, they know how to grow things. As individuals, we've never been as far removed from the land as we are today. We think we get our food from the grocery store, but in reality it's the result of mean and women struggling with debt and weather and nerves to control a landscape so vast it boggles the mind. And control it they do. Why, the nile is so good this year they're literally piling it up on Main Street. Thomas Hart Benton would be right at home here. Now, I've been around some. National Geography has seen to that. I've photographed oranges in California, peppers in Louisiana, peas in the 'Paloose. But each fall I make sure I'm back home again. It's the best time of all, the payoff for the extreme cold and mud and heat of the other three seasons. Prairie grasses mimic the setting sun. Football begins. Combines bring home smiling men late at night, anxious to wake their wives with news that the last field just made hundred bushel corn. At Thanksgiving we take full measure of the this land of ours. What and pork, beef and beans, they all pay off at once it seems. And though most of us are not on the land anymore, we can still touch the earth on this one special day. With pheasant feather centerpieces and in our best clothes we hold hands, look down, and offer up a prayer. It's a long one, running the gamut from health and happiness to the dearly departed. We pray next year will be even more abundant, bringing with it better prices and better yields, and that the hail and the grasshoppers and the frost won't come. We know what it takes to keep the world fed. We pause after this prayer, for there is redemption in it for all of us, and we can't help but smile.