Crystal Corn Grains
Fable
Upper French Broad River Valley
All the Corn grains turn to Crystals on the stalks
Deer suffer
People at first “rich” – then poor as the wealth shifts,
stones devalue,animals suffer, health suffers, and the true wealth of the
people is lost
What is the connection to
It started in the
Upper French Broad River Valley when all the corn plants started bearing grains
of crystals instead of grains of corn.
What about the connection to the White Squirrel ?
It ws the White
Squirrel Festival whose magic caused the corn grains to begin ...
Research from MtnExpress
Research from Xvania Times + Histories of theWhite Squirrel,
WS Festival, etc.
It started one spring when all the
grains of corn on the stalks turned into crystals instead of corn. At first the
farmers didn’t know what was going on. They noticed the sound of the wind
through the leaves and silks was not the same as they were used to. Instead of
a whispery, hissy rush there was a tinkling, like glass bells from a distant,
dark forest.
As the corn ripened, the silks
turned red – red like threads of the deepest vermillion.
Soon the farmers started talking.
At church Sunday, at the community centers, over work they helped one another
do.
“Have you noticed anything about
the corn?” they asked.
Before long, it became certain that
something strange was going on. You could see straight through the leaves of
the corn shucks like they were they wings of a dragonfly – and underneath them,
plumping up, were bright jewels where the kernels of corn should be.
Farmer Mack, who was tired of
running a 5000-head chicken operation, and grew corn only on his own, small
vegetable plot with his family, was at first amazed and then greedy. He plucked
a small ear of corn from the stalk before the normal time of picking, grabbed a
hold of the shucks, and pulled them back to get to the jewels inside. The
unripe gems disintegrated into a million pieces as soon as he touched them.
“Not ripe!” he said, chagrined at
opening an ear of corn too early and losing such a spectacular crop.
By now word had spread. Some
speculated on the source of this ripening treasure.
There had been a wondering magician
at the White Squrrel Fesitval the previous year, who had promised abundance for
the river valley beyond anyone’s wildest expectation – and done a lot of fancy
magic tricks with fireworks and ponies.
Edna May wondered if this strange,
ripening harvest was an answer to a prayer she had been making in Church every
Sunday for the past six months – a prayer for wealth which had typically
focused on winning the lottery.
Others believed it was the dark and
playful fairies of the Pisgah mountains – a range of forested waterfalls and
clear cascades where a deep natural magic still lived, perched above the valley
at a distance.
Farmer John thought maybe it was
the biodynamic preparations he had just started using that very year with their
almost alchemical ingredients and great rituals of vortex-inducing stirring
that reminded him of the witches’ pots he’d heard about in stories.
No matter what anyone thought,
though, the fact was that the corn on the stalks was growing gemstones. And the
news had spread. Certain people in Asheville, a tall city in a valley downriver
a day or so by ferry, were growing very interested. No one’s corn in the Big
House Plantations on the outskirts of the city showed any signs of being
different than normal. People started to arrive from afar, and haggle.
A man in a tall tophat and velvet
waistcoat spoke to Farmer John about perhaps getting his hands on some of that
year’s harvest.
The corporate seed-producers,
secretly as mystified as anyone else, claimed suddenly a total ownership over
all the corn grown by the farmers who had bought their seeds that year – and
then went a step further, claiming that it was their seeds’ DNA that gave rise
to the jewelled kernels in the first place, and that somehow that DNA had
transferred to all the corn in the valley, and that therefore they technically
owned in rights and totality the entire corn crop of every farmer in the entire
region. “Genetic drift,” they said. “It’s our genome, our genetic drift, our
problem, and our harvest,” they told the farmers, the politicians, and the
county commissioners.
During this time, many fancy new
cars, were seen being driven around town
by the local farmers, politicians, and county commissioners – most of whom had
never been able to afford such luxuries before.
Lucky Farmer Morell. He had planted
the earliest this year, and all his crop survived. It was a small patch – but lush.
When the silks turned their deepest vermillion red, and hung limp and spent on
the ears, he peeled back the parchment-transparent shucks, and inside were
whole, plump pearls, rubies, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, garnets, even a few
quartz crystals. Farmer Morell had planted Early Multicolor – and was he a
lucky man. He started in right away on plans for a great mansion on the hill,
local architects were suddenly employed, landscape designers found reason to
celebrate again, and envy flowed thick among the community.
