Spring Planting

The winter had been mild: days bright with sunshine, nights when snow fell gently on the waiting land. Now the soil was dry and good, ready to come to life with the first warm breezes. In the rich black loam of Lyon County, farmers al ready were sowing oats, a full three weeks early.

In his 60-year-old frame farmhouse, tall, strapping Ralph Delair crawled out of bed at 5:30, pulled on long underwear, two heavy shirts, ankle-high shoes, blue denim overalls, two sweaters, a thick mackinaw, a battered felt hat. He started a roaring wood fire in the nickel-plated kitchen range, touched a match to ash and hackberry logs in the living-room fireplace.

Lantern in hand, he stepped into the pitch-black barnyard, his breath frosted in the air.

The barn was full of familiar early-morning smells: the sweetness of hay trampled into moist earth, musty harness leather, animals stirring in their stalls.

As Ralph Delair milked the cow, there came another odor: food sizzling in an iron skillet. Farmer Delair's plump, handsome wife had breakfast waiting: bacon, eggs straight up, orange juice, oatmeal, hot biscuits, home-churned butter, jam she had put up last fall, a big pot of strong black coffee-a big breakfast for a big day's work.

After the meal, while dishes rattled in the kitchen, Farmer Delair smoked the new pipe his wife gave him for a Valentine. As the sky grew lighter, he went outside with son Ralph Jr., who had stayed home from Ople High School to help Hired Hand James Dieker.

They warmed up two tractors, roared out to the fields to disc and drill the low-lying, gently undulant land between the well-filled streams. By the time the sun was high in the sky, at 8, they had done a full hour's work; by noon, when they went back for dinner of steak & potatoes, they had nearly finished some fields. By week's end a full 200 acres would be sown to oats-oats that would be harvested in July, fed to the sleek steers that Ralph Delair ships off to the markets.

Ralph Delair stayed in the fields until the sun had sunk over the low hills in the west. Then he milked his cow again, fed his stock, covered the tractors for the night, ate a supper of roast beef, potatoes, biscuits. When the dark came, he was in the old-fashioned sitting room off the kitchen, smoking his pipe, listening to the radio, reading what old William Allen White had to say about weather and politics in the Emporia Gazette. At 9:30 he was in bed, sound asleep, not hearing the stinging Kansas wind whipping the darkened house.

Farmer Delair had put in a good day's work. It had been a good day's work for the whole U.S., for all the lands that need American food.

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