Fields of dreams

I love Indiana cornfields in July. The brilliant green stalks of new corn stretch across the fields from the edges of the country roads to the horizon, swaying in the breeze and soaking up the sun.

I've was surrounded by the cornfields throughout most of my childhood. My family grew a small lot of corn, along with beans and tomatoes. As a kid, we played in the fields in the summer, and in the fall, we shucked Indian corn and fed handfuls to the horses for treats, or corned the house of Old Man Grimm down the road at Halloween. Nearly everyone I knew got their first job at the age of 13 detassling corn.

I didn't appreciated how beautiful the farmlands here were until I moved out west in my 20's. Colorado was breathtaking, and I'd never seen anything like the Rocky Mountains. The color of the peaks, and the sharp, jagged tops of the mountains piercing the sunset was just awesome. But there were no cornfields in Denver, at least not like in Indiana. There were no rolling waves of soybeans in the fields, no combines in the fall to bring in the harvests. I had no idea how much I liked the fields until I missed them.

Around my house, we live for the summer corn from local fields. We wait, and wait, and wait. We don't buy corn from the grocery because we wait for the local farmers to pull their trucks up to the side of the road with the bed piled high with corn from the fields, or for the wives to start setting up their vegetable stands on the outskirts of town with their Indiana peppers and tomotoes and melon, green beans and onions. And corn. Unfortunately, the season doesn't last nearly long enough. The stands close up by the end of August.

The pick-up trucks pulled up this morning, overflowing with corn. It's a happy day around here!