by Angi Grantham

Created on: May 30, 2008   Last Updated: June 09, 2008

The Mysterious Corn Holers

Every year my mom and dad planted a large garden. They always encouraged my brother and me to help with the chore of weeding and to enjoy the garden as we did so. It was okay to eat as we weeded, but the weeding had to be done.
The year I was seven and my little brother was five is the year we were actually assigned specific areas of the garden to be responsible for. I got tomatoes, which was fine with me, I love tomatoes and snacked to my heart's content. My brother Ben got the corn ,which was his favorite. We were doing pretty good with keeping up on the weeds. We worked on our chore diligently, so we were out there every day. You could actually tell that the veggies grew in the garden too!

One day my dad came out to check on our progress and noticed a weird aberration around the corn patch. He called us both over and asked us if we had noticed anything unusual.
"No dad," was our reply.
"Well," he says," there are tons of weird little holes all around the corn rows and I was wondering if you guys had seen any bugs or snakes?"
I was quite frightened and then puzzled, I hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary, and the tomatoes didn't have any funny holes around them. My brother acted very upset and proceeded to look at all of the areas with my dad.
Every day more of these holes appeared around the corn rows but, I never noticed anything different in the garden. Ben said he hadn't seen anything either. Although we were always on the alert for the tunneling corn holers,(our personal name for the phenomena) the mystery deepened.
Until one sunny day when my mom happened to be in the garden weeding with us. She was over in the beans which were situated between the corn and the tomatoes, almost dead center of the garden. When all at once she starts to shriek, "No,No, go in the house, not out here!"
Of course, being a short girl of seven years, I couldn't see exactly what she was yelling about. The next thing I know she is marching my brother through the garden and into the house.
The mystery had solved itself.Or rather the detective work of mom had cracked the case. All summer long my little brother had been forgoing his bathroom breaks. If he had to go he went around the corn. Hence the funny holes everywhere. He took his chore very seriously and never did take a bathroom break unless it was in the corn.
We all laughed about it that day. We sure had tall corn that year! I wonder if the extra watering had helped.

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