Dew

I imagine that there are lots of people who never know if there is dew on the grass in the morning.  Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn't, and it makes a big difference in my work experience in the earliest moments of the day.

Way back in the olden days when we used to pick corn every morning -- just after dawn -- we generally expected a heavy dew.  This was before the invention of all those waterproof fabrics, and we probably would not have had them anyway.  Heck, most of us don't wear waterproof clothing even now.  It's too expensive and too hot.  Anyway, we wore long sleeved turtlenecks and blue jeans, and sometimes we even wrapped our faces in a bandana.  Without dew, that was a lot of clothing.  But we were plunging into a field of corn, usually taller than we were, and every leaf was coated with water.  We were soaked from head to toe within a few minutes.  It kept us cool after the day began to warm up, and corn picking only took a few hours at the most.  By the time we were finished, the leaves were dry and could slice the skin on our cheeks and necks if we didn't keep our heads down and protect our faces by carrying the basket of corn out on our shoulders.

So on the rare day when the temperature did not drop enough in the night to get to the dew point, we would arrive in the field to find a scratchy, unpleasant task ahead of us.  We hated those days.  Then we had to grit our teeth (holding our bandana in our teeth so it would stay up) and sweat.

Nowadays, there are no full body experiences like that at dawn. I pick flowers once a week just as the colors emerge and it reminds me of those early morning corn picks.  The zinnias are as tall as I am, and the dew soaks into my clothes.  I used to calculate how much money the flowers were worth per hour, and I think it was competitive with sweet corn.  Not as athletic, certainly, and much more solitary, but the tendrils of fog just above the ground and the dripping leaves and the sun just coming over the trees bring back those soggy first moments, decades ago.

And I still feel cheated when it is dry at 6 AM.  Cheated and hot. This morning was one of those dewless dawns when you have about 12 minutes before you start to sweat.  I do wonder how many people even know about the range of moisture that is possible in those first minutes.  I am guessing the native Americans had about 25 words to describe the various levels of dew.  I could certainly use more.  Late August and into September -- that's when there is the most dew. 

We are into real dew season now.  It is thick with memories and associations -- my father when he was alive and strong, my mother when she had a long black braid and she wore white dress shirts to pick corn, my sisters and brother when they were part of the daily work, the crew in 1980, Jon when he first arrived, and so many mornings in the 1990s when I went alone to Loudoun to pick, when I was the only cornpicker left.