Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 222, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 September 1911 — HOW TO EAT ROASTING EARS [ARTICLE]

HOW TO EAT ROASTING EARS

pKberant and Poetical Instructions for the Proper Handling es Qreen > . Corn at the Table. y Don’t cut It down and eat it with a ■poon. Don’t stick silver spikes In the end and run It as a lathe. Don’t break it into nubbins and nibble It from between the forefinger and the thumb. This is no dinky business. It Is as big as the morning sunshine. It is-not just eating; ft is not keeping soul and body together. It is letting the soul out, letting it range over broad acres of waving corn, that rival the heavens in glory and extent, the finest token of earth’s richness and prodigality anywhere seen. Catch onto that. Flaunt your fancy about in the limitless ocean of sunshine and showers, of which the roasting ear is only a wisp 'of the creamy spray. This thing of tackling a roasting ear, like a stolid mute, for the corn Itself, lowers It to the level of picking up chips or running an errand; he is Just satisfying an appetite and might as well eat fried onions with a caseknife. That kills hunger. It silences a paving. But eating green corn has a higher mission than that. It puts one as close to nature as lying in a bed of lilies. One cannot taste the sunshine anywhere as when he seizes a juicy ear of oorn in his eager fists and goes at it with an open countenance apd a happy smile, ripping off the row's of sweetened dews' and dawns till his mouth and soul reek with delight.

Eat it on the cob; the whole cob; the longer the better. Take It as nature gives it to you—its naked beauty, in its jeweled loveliness, in its Juicy richness. Don’t-peck it as a blackbird does a sunflower, but revel in ft, luxuriate in it, bite all of the tints of mom, the soft gales of the afternoon, the glow of the starlight, the hymn of the sparrow, the laughing dewdrops and the smile of the rainbow—they are all there for the alert soul that has a fancy above food. He who does not see them nor feel them is not worthy of a roasting ear. -o

But the main thing is the recklessness, in the eating it, the joyous abandon in cleaving off the pearly richness, the getting right down intq the glory of the act, mindless of napkin, finger bowls or who is looking. A dilletante cannot any more eat corn on the cob than he can skin a cat. He measures his acts by a stifling propriety and not by the broad light of the souL Dear reader, join the soul and eat corn like a sparrow flies ,to heaven—with a song’ on your mouth. ’ —Chamber’s Journal.' . .