Crystal Corn Grains

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.