I really only meant to take a few pictures and then go back inside. It was close to bedtime, after all, and we don’t usually go romping across the fields after dinner. Sometimes we swing a bit or go to dig in the sand pile, but mostly we clean things up and then run circles ’round one another until Mama hollers that it’s bedtime, or someone crashes into someone else and we all have a good cry, or sometimes both.
But the home we call Janderhil is surrounded by fields and fields of farmland with ever-shifting identities; sometimes they’re cornfields, sometimes they’re bean fields, but this summer they’re wheat, and they’ve gone from deep green to yellow-gold in the weeks since we’ve moved here. The wind is strong here on the Hill, good for drying clothes outdoors and for a windmill (if we had one). And the wind blows the wheat in acre-long ripples that makes it move just like water.
It’s impossible for me to see the waving stalks of wheat and not think about Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem Pirate Story: