PREVIOUS
HOME
NEXT

In these few square yards of northeast Kansas, purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) and homegrown tomatoes (maters delectabilis) -- more than the inevitable mid-summer drought or the evitable rodeo and county fair in the last weeks of July, and even more than the flammable works in the first -- signal the arrival of high summer, as they do throughout much of the central plains. Overnight, the front flower bed just beyond the shade of the burr oak produced its first coneflower blossom of the season, and elsewhere in the yard green tomatoes dawdled on the vine, plotting how they might postpone their debut until July 4th, when the summer itself will have become overripe and the surrounding hills will have started to fade from their high-summer green back to the khaki they will wear throughout winter.

Okay, I'm better now. (Well, we'll see, won't we.) But I do love summer, and today has been a great summer day, filled with high heat, high humidity, high hopes for a cleansing summer thunderstorm, and emptied of reason for dudgeon high or low.

The eminent wordsmith and Singenmeister James Brown said it best:

I upload this silly trifle for no other reason than that I am riding a summer-induced wave of elation and cannot help myself.

Reading:
Still working through the Stegner essays. From the essay "The West Coast: Region with a View":

I believe this is truly not a region but the mainstream, America only more so.