It is an August day, and the corn is ripe. My sunburn has turned to flakes of white powdery skin that dot my arms and shoulders. The windows of our blue Studebaker have been cranked down to let in the warm summer breeze. Dad and I are on our way to the Wileys’ farm in Scarborough to buy a dozen ears of corn.

Our route takes us through woods where my father tells me he and his best friend, Karl, “hunted” many Indians in their youthful imaginings. The woods are four miles or more from his childhood home in South Portland, but he passed through them often as a boy, riding his bicycle to his uncle’s farm where he earned 25 cents a week doing chores.

I take this road with him all summer, on our way to Higgins Beach for a swim on a hot evening, or returning from a day there with my family, my skin salty and the sand inside my bathing suit scratching.

Further along, past the piggery, the road makes a wide curve and the Wileys’ barn comes into view, then disappears as we drive past the fir, hemlock and pine trees that border the farm. The shadows of their great dipping boughs move along the hood of our car and slide up our windshield as we turn in to the driveway.

Stepping into the cool air of the barn, we breathe in the smell of hay and pause to look up at the beams of the vast structure that seems to rise forever in the dark. After our eyes adjust, we see Mrs. Wiley waiting at the back, lit by sunlight from a doorway that leads to the fields.

She is a tall, imposing figure and the paragon of a Maine grandmother. Her hair is white, soft and curled. She wears wire-rimmed glasses and a simple cotton house dress almost completely covered by a bib apron with wide shoulder straps. She has the shape so many older women do: a full breast pressed by a corset into a solid mass that blends with the waist.

Mrs. Wiley is reserved and never smiles in greeting. Standing behind a table laden with corn, she is distant and powerful, the keeper of the right to buy corn. Selling it seems serious business.

My father, however, softens her with his warmth, handsome face and humor. By the time she has filled a paper bag with a baker’s dozen ears of corn, “just picked today,” she has given him a big smile.

We carry the bulging brown bag to our car, and I think about the taste of corn and imagine the melted butter traveling in small streams down my arm. I think about the blueberry pie my mother baked this morning.

When we get home, my job will be to set the supper plates and glasses on the yellow wooden table in the breezeway, our summer dining room. Later, while I eat pie, I’ll watch the grass in the garden change color and disappear in the shadows as the sun sinks behind the steeple of a church in the distance and the trees in our yard.

We travel back to our home on the same familiar road, passing the same sights, and I store them for tomorrow and long past corn season.

Then I’ll remember the warmth of the wind, the taste of salt on my skin, the scratch of sand in my bathing suit, the cool darkness of the barn, the smell of the hay and the sweet taste of Mrs. Wiley’s “butter and sugar” corn. I will wrap the comfort of those trips around me in the chill of winter.

Martha Robinson Mayo is a Maine native who now lives in Marblehead, Mass.