Sugarbeet Birthday

I recently celebrated a birthday. Yes, I’m old, but I don’t feel it / think so.

The weekend was spent in the world-famous town of Peck, Michigan, population around 500. The school is grades pre-K thru high school. The senior class is about 26 students. It is sugarbeet harvesting bow-hunting season. Meaning . . .

The divided road out front of the house is heavily trafficked by convoys of trucks, open top, doubled up, stuffed with sugarbeets the color of maggots. Millions of them. I can hardly believe they are all coming from the fields around me. A zombie apocalypse of sugarbeets. They are trucked to Croswell the next town over, eight miles east, to a processing plant.

The Michigan Sugar Company who owns Pioneer Sugar processes 4,000-6,000 tons per day and has been in Croswell since 1902. At the plant the beets are piled 20 feet high, 200 feet wide and more than 1,000 feet long. Many of the piles have larger fans that blow cold air into the piles to help the beets store outdoors for more than 100 days. It is a time and water intensive process to extract the sugar, store, and package it for the consumer.

Meanwhile, the beets keep on coming, the trucks passing by my window at a rate of two every five minutes. All day and all night.

The bow hunting season means hunters are up in blinds hunting deer, turkey etc until Jan.1, so I’m not going to venture into the woods. I don’t want to die on this birthday. So I go outside with the baby in my arms and watch the sun suck into the horizon knowing we are moving into the shortest days of the year and that daylight savings time will bring darkness down me in late afternoon. We stay on the porch in an ashy dusk, dust stirred up by the rigorous harvest in the sugarbeet fields. The smell of upturned dirt in the air.