By Kathryn Ganfield
When my husband was a boy, he bused to a farmer's fields to detassel corn for a few dollars a day.
What did he spend his money on? Hubba Bubba bubble gum, Big League Chew, candy cigarettes, arcade games (Pac-Man can't help but die and needs countless quarters to keep chomping and alive), 2-liter pop bottles of Mountain Dew, and canisters of Pringles potato chips...Nothing that lasted long but gave him the sugars, salts, and fats he sweated away in the corn rows.
Think of how he sweated and sunburned on the tips of his ears where they poked out from his baseball cap. What did he hear in those ears? Restless wind, rustling leaves, maybe a motor—other teenagers talking, joking. Maybe someone wore a Walkman and pop music spilled out from the headphones.
I read him this imagined memory.
“Well, that’s romantic,” he says.
“Want to know what I saved that money for?”
Of course he was saver. I should know better after knowing him since he was barely more than a boy.
The blue backpack in our basement, he tells me. That’s what he bought with his $4.25 an hour earned in the cornfield. His first frame backpacking backpack bought though he had never been backpacking and had no specific plans to go. His aspiration in that hot, perspiring summer was in a plasticky blue backpack, one that he’s saved to this day. All his hopes stored inside.
Though very tall, he was not even thirteen. Just a boy under cloudless blue skies, with a blue backpack thick in his dreams. I ache so tender for him, hearing this was his first job. I don't know why it nibbles at me so. Children have always helped on farms ever since they were invented and detasseling is common-enough summer work for teens. But something slips in my heart for a skinny school boy bused to where the suburbs ended and farm fields stretched on and on. Is it that his hopes were so small — or that they’re saved forever?
Use of “backpack” Do you want to let this go or should I insert different words?
Euforia Abstracta en la Ciudad de Invisible by Vivian Calderon Bogoslavsky
About the Author
Kathryn Ganfield is a nature writer and teaching artist in the river town of St. Paul, Minnesota. Her work focuses on family, environment, and the climate in crisis. She is a past Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Fellow, Paul Gruchow Essay Contest winner, and two-time Pushcart nominee. Her prose appears in Hippocampus, Water~Stone Review, Creative Nonfiction, and River Teeth, among other literary journals.
About the Artist
Vivian Calderón Bogoslavsky is a Colombian artist with Argentine roots who has dedicated more than 25 years to exploring art as a space of emotion, color, and connection. With a background in Anthropology, History, and Journalism, she combines artistic sensitivity with a deep understanding of the human experience. Her work brings to life invisible cities and abstract landscapes, places that invite viewers to lose themselves in the balance between chaos and harmony. She primarily works with mixed media on paper and canvas, using water, pigments, sand, and stucco to shape universes born from spontaneity.