Snopki

This time of year Dad would glean a few armsful of dry cornstalks that had missed the chopper at corn harvest  in the neighboring fields. He would bind them together in sheaves and prop them up at doorposts with bright pumpkins and gourds arrayed around them. Indian corn, in purples, reds, yellows, whites, and blacks, he would hang near them.

So for our snopki we had stalks of American cow-corn grown by American farmers - owner-operators of their farms, and of the farm machinery that lightens the work and vastly increases productivity.

In centuries past, across Europe, the snopki were of wheat or barley straw. At harvest, the peasants walked along in a line, each with a scythe, cutting the wheat or barley. Others would follow behind, binding the stalks into sheaves and standing three or four sheaves upright against each other so that if rain fell it would mostly drain off.

Still, the sheaves had to be dry when brought into the barn. So on a bright, sunny day following a few good drying days, there would take place "bringing in the sheaves."

This is "Chłopiec niosący snop" - "Boy Carrying a Sheaf." 

Snop is a sheaf; snopy, sheaves.

Snopek is a little sheaf; snopki, little sheaves.

 Aleksander Gierymski painted this in 1893 in a Polish village called Bronowic. Looks like a good dry day, doesn't it? By the shadow I would say it is late morning, which it would have to be for the dew to have burned off. The field is otherwise empty as much as we can see, so maybe they have been doing this for a few days, planning their harvest festival all the while.

Leszek Lubicki maintains a fascinating blog, Obrazowo rzecz ujmując, ("Figuratively Speaking") for his discussions of Polish paintings of late C19 and early C20.  Lubicki includes in what I call his Snopek post, his essay on this one painting of Gierymski, a photo of the painting as displayed at the National Museum in Wrocław.

Notice the bronze of the man with a scythe.

OSS CBI Photobook 19, Town and Country

 The encampment outside Hsian/Xian, and the city itself, continue as the subjects of the photos.

Below, we see the carbine in some detail, as well as the rifle strap, here and here, which made it to Marilla and is now in the Trove.

 

Who is the soldier below? Do his descendants have this picture of their own Mom and Dad, or grandparents?

 

 

Visual depth is provided by the figures walking along this receding, curving road. What's that blob in the middle, on the side of the road?

Enlarged on-screen, it looks for all the world like a snopek, a pile of grain sheaves stacked so as to make rain sluice off instead of soaking in.

 

Grain and rain, like those fluffy clouds in the sky, are the same the world over and through time. We have considered snopki before now, on G&C.  Here is a Polish painting from 1893.

 

 

 

The Drum Tower, in Hsian/Xian, shows up once more. Enlarged, we can see that the photographer must be sitting in the back of a Jeep that has the windshield turned down flat.

 

 

That little kid shows up again, tending to his business, but this time we see more figures in the background.  Enlarged, the double doors on the building in the background show pretty clearly.

This grain is barley, I'd say, from the way the seed head, heavy with seed, curves down a little, and also shows, even in the blurry background of the photo below, the suggestion of the famous barley "beard."

Botanical illustration does help.

        

"Barley or millet" were the crops north of the Yangtze, reported MMB. Millet does look quite different:

On the next page, things get serious, with photos relating to the drop in Hsinhsiang described in Chapter 2 of MMB.