What's Right With Kansas

Oh, I have walked in Kansas
Through many a harvest field,
And piled the sheaves of glory there
And down the wild rows reeled:

Each sheaf a little yellow sun,
A heap of hot-rayed gold;
Each binder like Creation's hand
To mold suns, as of old.
- Vachel Lindsay, Kansas

I was born, and spent my first five years, living just across the lane from a wheatfield at the foot of Pike's Peak. This time of year, as the season turns from Lammas to Mabon, memories of that field come flooding back to me, especially one golden late-afternoon that I (I may have been four years old) spent swinging in a swing, w/ my Grandma standing beside me and chatting with me as the gold faded to deep purple. I had a wonderful Grandma. I hope to be as good a grandma to G/Son as she was to me.

"And down the wild rows reeled." That's an amazing lovely line, and a deeply important intuition concerning the straigh rows of wheat and corn that we grow here in the U.S. of A.