Saturday, August 11, 2012

The Weather Report from Iowa



Riding in the back of my brother's minivan to and from his three-year-old granddaughter's birthday party, the tassels on the cornfields were spun into gold by the late afternoon sunlight. Each farmplace was a micro-metropolis as it rose out of the molten glow. Skylines of silos, grain bins, and an occasional windmill towered above barns, houses, machine sheds, and a scattering of outbuildings--each farm isolated from the next by a moat of rolling fields.

The drought has not been completely devastating here in this part of Iowa, but some farmers are chopping their corn earlier than usual. The empty fields might be a harbinger of early fall, the days already unseasonably cool; the mosquitos perhaps departed for warmer, sweatier places where there's more bare skin. Of course, everything can shift with the slightest whisper of notice. Too hot, too cold, too dry too wet, too good to last is what farmers say about the weather.

4 comments:

Suz said...

oh, beautiful Iowa
have a fun time
a loving time

Elizabeth said...

It's somewhat comforting to hear that there's a part of the heartland that has living corn. It has sounded like a sort of corn apocalypse from the media --

Anonymous said...

Gorgeous photo. Did you take it?

We're having the opposite problem here, bumper crops with our hot, wet weather.

Wrinkling Daily said...

"everything can shift with the slightest whisper..." so true about everything. I live in the part of Jersey, south, that used to be known and still is to a lesser degree for its blueberry fields, cranberry bogs and cornfields and tomatoes galore. As much as I love the ocean,and here, we have the best of both worlds one not far from the other, but the farm, the dark earth, is what really gets to me. Have fun in your old neck of the woods. I would love to hear more.