We pulled into Hollerby’s Family Farm on Saturday at the precise hour the website calls “golden,” and before I even got the twins out of their car seats I could smell it — that specific dry, papery, almost-cinnamon corn-husk smell that everybody tells you is the smell of fall. I now know it is the smell of something else. It is the smell of a chemical called diquat, and Cleo had her whole cheek pressed against a stalk of it before I’d finished latching the diaper bag.
I did not know this on Saturday. On Saturday I was the woman in the flannel poncho letting a four-year-old eat a kettle-corn kernel off the ground. I figured it out Sunday morning, the way I figure most things out, which is by lying in bed at 5:47 a.m. and asking my phone why corn would be standing up brown and crunchy in the middle of October when the corn behind our own house is still green and mostly horizontal.
It turns out — and a woman in my Facebook group Cornfields and the Chemicals That Stand Them Up has been screaming about this since 2021 — that maze corn doesn’t dry the way nature dries corn. Nature takes its sweet time. Maze corn has a Halloween schedule. So a few weeks before opening day, the farm hits the whole field with a desiccant, which is a polite agricultural word for “we killed it on purpose so it would rustle right.” The stalks turn brown overnight. They make that sound. Children walk through them.
My sister-in-law Tessa, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and has read more vaccine inserts than most pediatricians, says diquat is “basically Roundup’s meaner cousin” and that the EU has banned it, which is what she says about most things, but she’s right enough of the time that I’ve stopped fact-checking her in front of company. She also said, and I’m quoting, “that’s why those mazes smell like a dry-cleaner if you really stop and breathe.” I had stopped and breathed. She is correct.
So I went back Sunday afternoon — without the kids, with my list of polite questions written on the back of a Trader Joe’s receipt — and I found Marlene’s cousin Deb running the kettle corn booth, which is a sentence I did not expect to type this fall. Deb confirmed, cheerfully, while bagging a quart of caramel corn for a man in a Bass Pro hat, that yes, Roy sprays the field the second week of September “so the maze is ready for the church groups,” and that the smell I was describing as dry-cleaner was “probably just the corn dust, hon, it gets in your sinuses.” Roy was not available for follow-up. Roy was on the wagon driving the wagon.
Cleo, for the record, is fine. She has a small rash on the cheek that touched the stalk, which my husband insists is “from the corn being scratchy,” and which I insist is the body’s intelligent response to a known herbicide, and we are both going to be right in our own ways for the rest of our marriage. Wyatt has not stopped coughing since Saturday night, but Wyatt has also not stopped coughing since August, so I am not assigning that one to Hollerby’s specifically. The twins ate a candy apple and slept for fourteen hours, which felt clarifying.
What we are doing instead — because I am not the mother who simply removes a thing and offers her children grief in its place — is a maze of our own, in the back pasture, with the actual living green corn we did not chemically execute. My husband ran the tractor through it Tuesday in a kind of loose figure-eight. It is not impressive. The walls are six feet tall and forty percent leaning. You can see over most of it if you are taller than a fifth-grader. But nothing in it has been sprayed with anything except the rain.
I’m bringing date balls and a thermos of raw apple cider from Beth’s orchard up the road, the one that doesn’t UV-zap anything, and a battery lantern for after dark. Marlene already RSVP’d no. She said the green corn “feels wrong underfoot” and she’d rather take her kids someplace that “sounds like fall is supposed to sound.” I told her that sound is diquat. She told me to stop saying diquat at the carpool line. We are still friends.