He and his wife are proud of that field. They should be. It’s produced thousands of ears of corn, fed family and friends, and given us some lasting life lessons.

In the cornfield, we’ve learned that threats require vigilance. It’s satisfying to peel back the leaves of an ear to check its ripeness. It’s disgusting to find an ugly bug dug into the kernels, making mush of the area. A swift slice of a knife chops away the offending part. But with it goes a good part of the ear. So we spray, we pray and we pick off the bugs when we see them. Bugs in the cornfield remind us we’re never totally in charge.

The weather reminds us too.

That horrific October storm decimated the cornfield. Heavy with nearly ripe ears of corn, the stalks bowed down to those battering winds and, by morning, lay flat on the ground. I walked with my son to his field and stood by as he mourned the destruction. “Maybe this isn’t a total loss,” I told him. He replied that the stalks still needed about two more weeks to ripen their ears. “Well, then we have to stand them up,” I said, with no idea how we could. But he knew.

We gathered random rope and poles — metal, wood, whatever we could rummage up — and started resurrecting the field. Row by row, we pounded poles into the ground at each row’s end, then ran the rope from one to the other, standing the stalks up as we went so they leaned against the rope. It wasn’t tidy or neat when we finished, but the stalks were more vertical than horizontal. He went off to work believing that sometimes when all seems lost, it might not be. Two weeks later, he harvested the entire field.

Dead cornstalks are not useless.

A young grandson needs to get rid of some energy. “Come with me,” I tell him, heading to the cornfield. At first, he doesn’t think this is going to be fun. I don’t let him dwell on that. I show him how to take the cornstalks I’m digging up and pound them against a post to get the dirt off the roots. I challenge him to then throw the stalks as far across the field as he can. He thinks maybe that could be fun, the pounding and the throwing.

So he starts into it and, with a little encouragement, is soon pounding the stalks so hard I wonder if the post will survive. The first stalk he flings sails just a few feet away. But then he gets the hang of how to throw a stalk (like a spear) and pretty soon he’s sending them halfway across the field. He’s his own competition, so the only way he can “win” is to do better than his last toss. He’s having a blast, I have a helper and the field gets cleared. He doesn’t realize that what we just did was work. He just wants to know if there are more cornstalks.

Irrigating a cornfield can grow a relationship.

The cornfield my dad raised was much larger than my son’s. And his irrigation water came at much more outlandish times. I remember irrigating with Dad at 2 a.m. No nearby streetlights meant a pitch-black field. We worked by feeling our way through the familiar lay of the land. Dad steered the water down the top of the row and when my bare feet felt it reach the row’s end, I called out to let him know it was there. In that rare hour together, we talked, shared, learned and listened. Looking back, I realize that of all the things I miss doing with Dad — gone now more than 20 years — irrigating in the night’s velvet darkness tops the list.

This year’s irrigation hour was 5 a.m. A few hours different meant early morning light. I irrigated with my son a few times, shepherding water while we grew together. The setting wasn’t as dramatic, but I hope it meant something to him. I know it did to me.

Cornfields grow corn. And insight and relationships and memories.

Beyond the corn, we choose the harvest.

D. Louise Brown lives in Layton. She writes a biweekly column for the Standard-Examiner.