“Mommy, I think we’re going to have to live here!”,  my daughter cried as we realized that we had been in this spot already.  We were lost!  Not only were we lost but we appeared to be walking in circles.  My son pointed out a rock that we had passed two previous times.  I looked up at the sky.  The once blue sky had grown cloudy and threatened rain.  I wondered just how many hours had passed as we wandered, heads to the ground, hoping to find our way.  Our map was useless.  Huge parts of it were missing, providing us only pieces of where we were and needed to go.  We came to a fork, the path split in three different ways.  My two older kids fought over which path to take.  I was pretty sure one of the trails looked familiar.  We had traveled on it during some of our wanderings.  My husband ended the argument by stating that we would take the third option.  Skirting a mud puddle, we continued our journey.   “This is crazy”  I thought and yelled up to the girl sitting on the deck high above us,  “Hey, can you give us a clue?”

Yes, we were participating in a favorite fall activity; the corn maze!  It’s really a bizarre thing to do.  To purposely get lost and wander aimlessly for hours through a crop.  My oldest son, when he was 2, got lost in a real cornfield.  It was scary!  He ran right in and disappeared, we could not see him at all!  But, with the corn maze, you enter in knowing that you will become the mouse scurrying this way and that, hitting dead ends and running in circles.  And for what?  The maze we completed handed out a piece of candy.  Candy!  It’s our cheese I guess!

But it is fun, the corn maze!  Usually.  My husband has been known to bust through the corn stalks in order to escape.  My personality requires me to complete anything that I have started so I continue to the end.  I love to watch and listen to the other families that are in the maze at the same time as us.  You get to know each other real well because everyone is running in circles.  To some it is a fun game complete with laughter and egging each other on.  Of course these  are usually the people who have just entered the maze.  They are still pumped.   Hours later it’s a different story!    At the two hour mark most become  resigned to the fact that they will wander the maze until it is harvested!

We have hit the same dead end for the 5th time and are contemplating building a corn stalk shelter.  We can use the leaves to create a roof and weave the silk into blankets.  For dinner we will gnaw on raw corn cobs and lap water from the mud puddle.  But instead we try one more turn and there it is!  The exit!  We have survived the corn maze.  A girl at the exit hands us each a piece of candy and we hold it above our heads, cheering as if it were a Olympic gold medal.  We pass a family getting ready to enter the maze.  “Was it fun?”,  they ask.  “It sure was!”, we answer with big smiles on our faces.