Erica Loves Pickles

Pickles from Jimmy John's.

Pickles from anywhere.

Sunday Morning, Late Summer

Coffee and comics,

pancakes by Merrill, bluebonnets by Rachel.

Raspberries

The world is so full of a number of things, 
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verse

                           
Don't get me wrong.  I don't really believe that all of the world's "things"can make a person happy.

But it's OK to be

simple.

childlike.

thankful.

Fresh raspberries as thick as chicken pox do cut a wide swath in the world of simple pleasures.

Audrey at Orientation

Talking to her classmates on the big screen.

This might not have been her favorite part of orientation.

Traveling Girl

These two studied to buy Rachel's new car in Texas.

These two danced it all the way back to Nebraska,

where this one packed it full of her belongings and zipped it off to Georgia.

Traveling girl.

Merrill

Celebrating Erica's Birthday

 First we spiked heart rates and adrenaline with Laser Tag.

Then a picnic helped us recover.

Great ideas, E.

IKEA

IKEA might be overwhelming.

Vet School Student

Random Dude Evan

Workin' the Farm, Part 2

Have I Mentioned.....

Corn, horses, girls, water, garden......

Have I mentioned that I love summer?

Digging into our First Duathlon

Texas August

Down here, they landscape their yards with prickly pear.

Can you blame them?

                                                                                                                            Active Advisory: Heat Advisory 

Here's Looking at You, Kid

The Smell of Corn Growing

It’s August.  That means that the air outside my back door is just a little heavier than normal, its usual thin, clear quality laced with the subtle smell of corn growing.  If you pull the back door shut and jump right into your pickup, you’ll miss it.  But if you linger a minute on the wooden steps, breathe deeply, and let your nose sample the wares, you notice.

Corn.  Like the smell of ears boiling in the pot on Grandma’s stove, only softer and brighter, a smell the color of late afternoon, late summer’s golden sun.

Smelling corn growing is like remembering a secret that someone told you long ago, a secret that you pull out, think about for a minute, smile and be thankful, and then tuck back away until next year.  It’s a secret smell completely missed by city life; nonexistent until you live in the country.  

 I think it's the pollen.

Every embryonic, greenish-white knob of a kernel in an undeveloped ear of corn has a sticky strand of silk connected to it.  The silks grow to the end of the ear and poke out of the husk in an unruly pony tail, waiting to be fertilized with pollen.  

At the top of each plant, a tassel pokes the sky, covered with anthers that look like rice.  They are filled with tiny pollen grains to drop onto those silks waiting on the ears below. Every silk that catches some will incubate its connected kernel under the husk, until it grows into a milky yellow lump of corn.   Silks that miss remain barren, leaving an empty spot in the finished ear.

It’s all silent work, performed by three million corn plants sporting three million tassels in the field just south of our house.  When each of those tassels tosses out a few million grains of pollen, it’s no surprise that my nose on the back porch finds a few of them.

Sometimes in August, the smell of corn growing gets washed out of the air by the smell of rain. 

And that’s even sweeter.

Counting Bales

Workin' the Farm

Garden Melon

Have I mentioned that I love summer?

Good Times

We loved skiing, even though there is definitely a learning curve.

There is a learning curve on fishing, too, but Ruth and Vic are good teachers.

We love summer fun.  Thank you, friends.

These are the good old days.