Green and Gold

I can't stop taking pictures of the wheat...in the early morning or the evening.

Everywhere there's gold, and everything's "geared up for harvest". Farm machinery has all been oiled, cleaned, and tested. The combines stand on freshly mowed grass beside the barns and hay bales, like a row of horses faunching at their bits.

Right now, for a few breathless days, the grain elevators stand tall and empty. The railroads only used in June are cleared and waiting for their annual carloads of grain.

Farming families are all taking this Memorial holiday very seriously. They are resting frantically before the busiest time of their year, rushing to the lake, to Branson, or to shop in the city. While they are gone, I gaze along beside the road, and stop in lonely places to take pictures of their wheat. If you look closely into the golden fields here, you can see a few bands and skimming hues of green. That too must fade to white under the high hot summer sky. Then will come the sound of trucks and combines...the sprinkle of spilled over grain along the highway...train whistles...dust in the air...shouts and sweat...harvest!

Fred the Farmer

If you've looked at children's toys lately, you've seen Bob the Builder--videos, trucks, books, and other such items. Well, in our church there's Fred, the Farmer.
Typical of the surviving prairie farmers in this area, he has worked incessantly all his life to make a success of his farm, his town, and his church. He's in charge of the courthouse clock tower, the church cemetery upkeep, flower arrangements at church every Sunday, and a host of other voluntary tasks that quietly get done without anybody noticing...oh and he still farms, and, somewhere, he finds time to weld and build. (You're not much of a farmer around here if you're not also a mechanical engineer, painter, cement worker, and welder.)




One day, I asked Jean, Fred's wife, if my carpool and I could swing by her house and take some pictures and whether we would be attacked by the farm dog if we got out of the Suburban. (I hadn't seen him, but I just knew they would have a big old dog guarding the place)
"Sure, come by anytime," she told me. "and that dog won't bite you, but he just might lick you to death."

So, driving home from school a couple of days ago, we cut through the country. When we ran across Fred's house, I pulled in and talked to the man himself--just as he was leaving to plow a field.

"Go ahead and take all the pictures you want," he told us. "See, there's the new sculpture I'm working on. It's going to be a sphere--8 feet in diameter."

Sure enough, there it was in the driveway. "This rock pile," he continued, pointing to a tall stack of stones, "well, one night, soon after they put this line here to anchor the electric post after the last big ice storm, I came running out to check on something and tripped over it...so I put this stack of rocks to keep that from happening again."

Tori and I snapped away; She really liked the metal silhouettes; I liked the birdhouses. They sit calmly in the garden against a wild prairie background, keeping little birds safe from the ever present threat of chicken hawks.
Anyway, here they are...a tribute to the ingenuity of Fred the Farmer, Jean, his wife, and their friendly, old brown dog, who followed us faithfully around trying to lick us to death.

P.S. Tonight my husband informed me that they are naming a bridge for Fred. He's famous around here for his county commissioner days. Doesn't surprise me in the least.