My neighbor Mr. Jackson just brought me a battered brown paper bag full of corn from his yard.
Even the bag looked just like a bag from my childhood.
The four of us, shooed out of the kitchen into the cooling twilight, with a big lumpy bag of corn to shuck.
The corn silk, withered and brown outside the leaves, silky and pale within the tassel. (The silky part felt sooo good, you wanted to keep it and use it for something, but if you did, and if you remembered you did, when you found it again it was shriveled up and dry.)
Slapping mosquitoes, slapping each other’s mosquitoes,
The slick little beads of the corn.
The occasional corn worm, yucky but interesting. (We’d save them from the pot by hiding them under some bushes. I don’t think even then we thought they’d survive very long, but a philosophical death under a rose bush seemed better than being popped into boiling water.)
My mom added milk to corn water, which makes it foam, and makes the corn sweeter. I still do. And I still love the look and feel and smell of corn silk.
If the intellect is a skinny stick figure standing on the side of a narrow road, the subconscious is a 16-wheel semi-truck barreling down the road at 90 miles per hour. Think of the stick figure waving and signalling, “Slow down slow down,” and the truck keeps on going as if nothing were happening (nothing is happening).
Dave Winer, Davenet essay “On Beauty in Women”.