Corn, but Not Forgotten by Grace

Corn, but Not Forgotten by Grace - November 2022 Scholarship Essay

The air is thick with mid-July heat, and I have never been so sweaty. It collects in the crook of my arms and the backs of my knees and seeps into my eyes. Beads of it drip onto the mats that I drag with me as I make my way through the fields, flattening corn stalks to give clean backgrounds to my photos of weeds, taken in service of the USDA.
When I first started looking for an internship, I decided that I wanted to work outside purely to avoid spending half my break trapped in a lab. I knew in the abstract that I’d be working in the dog days of summer, doing the same tasks day after day, but I’d never really envisioned it. Now it’s the only thing I can envision. My new favorite emotion is ‘shower euphoria’, the burst of unfettered joy that comes from watching the water turn brown and knowing that all the dirt is leaving your body. I go to bed at nine p.m. every night and dream of corn. So much corn.
But despite all the discomfort, I am miraculously, irrationally happy. Inspired by a writing class I took a few weeks earlier, I’ve started keeping a journal in poetry, writing a verse every evening and a final piece at the week’s end. What started out as a way of entertaining myself quickly turned into an indispensable method of gauging my emotions. Summers are strange; everything blurs, days stretching out into years, months, eons, and eras. I forget exactly how I felt about anything in particular. But my poetry journal reminds me. As I read through my verses, the trends are apparent: the days I spend working are by far my happiest.
Agriculture is not my passion. If I had to choose one, it would be much closer to my poetry than its subject. While my internship didn’t quite convince me that I wanted a life of fieldwork, it did convince me that I want a life of hard work. Sometimes I feel full of potential energy, water trapped behind a dam. If I’m not in motion, the pressure only builds, higher and higher. I want to be a river, wild and fast moving. I want to be the subject of poetry and mythology. I want to turn waterwheels, power cities, and embrace life. But I can’t do it standing still.
I tell people that I’ve spent years in a STEM magnet program as a method of finding myself. I was trying out science, I claimed, seeing if I’d like it, seeing how it fit. But as difficult as the work could be, and thought it never felt like my true calling, I don’t regret my choice. There was something wonderful about being given tasks and completing them to the best of my ability. I sank my teeth into learning and refused to let it go, even if I gagged on it. I wanted to do everything and be everything. I was proud of my good grades, but even more so of my bad ones because it meant I was challenged, and wasn’t wasting myself on a life too easy to be meaningful.
Out in the fields, I’m proud of my sweat, my unpaid internship, and how my shoulders ache after hours in the sun. When I come home, I am proud of the poetry I write, and the beauty I find in breaking through. I’m not sure exactly what I want to be. I’m not sure if I should dedicate myself to this beauty or follow the beaten path into the sciences, dizzy from the thousands of possible futures stretching out before me. But as I watch the shower water go muddy with the evidence of my living, I am sure of this: I want to be something.