The first time I learned my cornfield had become the biggest fall attraction in Cedar County, a woman I had never met was pounding a wooden sign into my soil.
The sign said the corn maze opened Saturday.
I was standing ten feet away holding the deed to the farm.
And nobody had asked me.
“Sir, you can’t park there,” the woman shouted.
I looked behind me.
My Ford F-250 was sitting on the gravel lane my grandfather had built in 1964.
“Where exactly would you like me to park?”
She pointed toward my south pasture.
“General parking is over there. Vendors go behind the barn.”
I stared at her orange volunteer vest.
Then at the temporary fencing stretching across my field.
Then at the portable toilets lined beside my irrigation shed.
Someone had driven forty steel posts into my ground.
Orange flags marked parking rows.
Three rented carnival tents stood near the tree line.
A banner hung between two utility poles.
CEDAR RIDGE HARVEST WEEKEND.
Beneath it were smaller words promising a corn maze, hayrides, cider tasting, pumpkin decorating, live music, and a “VIP sunset experience.”
I didn’t recognize the event.
I definitely recognized the land.
My name is Jack Mercer.
I was forty-two years old, and Mercer Farm had been in my family for eighty-seven years.
Six hundred and twelve acres outside Millbrook, Missouri.
Corn on the north fields.
Soybeans along the creek bottom.
Cattle pastures west of the house.
A machine barn built by my father.
A white farmhouse my grandfather had enlarged one room at a time whenever the family could afford lumber.
Nothing fancy.
Nothing decorative.
Nothing that looked like the kind of place where women wearing designer boots should be directing strangers to valet parking.
But that Thursday afternoon, my farm looked like someone had rented it for a corporate festival.
I had been gone nine days.
My mother had undergone knee replacement surgery in Kansas City, and I had stayed with her through the first week of recovery.
My hired hand, Tyler Grant, had been working the soybean fields on the western side of the property.
The north cornfield was ready for harvest, but moisture levels had been slightly high before I left.
I had planned to check it when I returned.
Apparently, while I was gone, somebody else had made plans for it too.
The woman with the vest walked toward me.
