The sea of grain is waving The song of the flock rings out This is my
land and its fields This is the Jezreel Valley May my land be blessed
and praised From Bet Alfa to Nahalal. -from "The Song of the Valley,"
Nathan Alterman, 1935
Tammuz is here. The weather forecast each morning is telegraphic:
"Same as yesterday." Driving through the broad fields of the Jezreel Valley, you
see that the grain has all been harvested; the fields are brown stubble and
giant bales of hay stand about, tilted at odd angles where they rolled off the
baling machine, except for the ones lashed onto double trailer rigs that seem to
be laboring up every hill on every two-lane road in the Galilee (in front of
me). Makeshift corn and melon and watermelon stands have sprung up like weeds
along the highways. There are vast green fields of cotton. And sunflowers, with
their heavy heads bowed, as if to hide their transition from smiling flower-face
to a black and white mass of seeds whose close-packed diamond shapes seem
crystalline. Years ago, a teen group I was accompanying on an Israel tour spent
their kibbutz stint helping with the sunflower harvest. Our task was to go
through the field and harvest only heads over a certain size - for seed for
planting, as the kibbutz was interested in breeding a high-yield variety. I had
always just thought of sunflowers as a decorative plant, and was surprised and
impressed by these geometrically perfect arrays of thousands of seeds on heavy
disks 8-10 inches across - on thousands of plants spread across vast fields,
their heads all bowed in the same direction. And it was neat to snack on them as
we worked our way down the rows.
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