Desultory Thoughts

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

The floor of my kindergarten classroom.

DESULTORY THOUGHTS

Rain overnight brightened the winter wheat.

Some might say that the present color of wheat is emerald green. But when I see those winter fields, I’m reminded of green Crayolas, those thick, seemingly unbreakable crayons that fit into the sweaty grip of 5-year-old fingers.

A healthy crop of winter wheat is the same shade of the green crayon that I reached for as I sat at a shared desk in my kindergarten classroom. There, my friends and I colored in pictures for each letter of the alphabet. For the letter e, it was a picture of an egg. For f, a fish.

That’s the equation in my mind: a green wheat field equals crayons and kindergarten, but I may be the only one who connects those particular things. A farmer, for instance, while gazing toward the same field may have other thoughts: how much rain we got last night, will it be enough, the price of wheat, and whether his grain truck will hold up for another harvest.

As we look out into the world, we see things through the eyes of our experiences. We bring our personal histories to whatever we observe. Each of us sees the world through a different lens, our own.

To step into someone else’s thoughts would be like entering a foreign country, but I’d love to visit other people’s minds to see how they observe the world. And maybe that’s why some people write fiction, to interpret life with a new map.

On a recent trip to Salina, I studied the landscape as usual. I saw cattle grazing in these green wheat fields and wondered how it is that they don’t consume the crop before it has a chance to grow. I noted how the sky reflected gray in the farm ponds that day, and I turned to look at a favorite wooden barn that I study each time I drive past.

Rain hit the windshield. The thin lines of rain sounded like sewing pins landing on the floor. As the black wipers arced on the window, windshield wiper songs came to mind. First I hear the Eddie Rabbitt tune, “Driving my Life Away,” and then Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.”

We all have desultory thoughts when we drive, random things that pop into our minds, thoughts and memories that are triggered by whatever catches our eyes.

As always, when driving past Lehigh on U.S. 56, I think of the late Pete Goering, a Lehigh native, who wrote for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He and I had exchanged a few emails some years ago and we both had Mennonite backgrounds. He was a great writer and I miss reading his columns.

With a stock tank beneath it, I see a windmill spinning in a pasture. I’m not sure if it still pumps water, but the blades are getting a workout in the wind. It reminded me of my grandma’s windmill near her garden. In the ‘60s, Grandma kept a board over the dry well, lifting the wood to throw her trash down the hole: old Grit newspapers, church bulletins, Vicks Vapor Rub and Milk of Magnesia bottles, empty Corn Flakes boxes – the ones she didn’t cut up into squares to use for quilt patterns.

Grandma didn’t have much trash, actually. She grew and canned her own vegetables, raised chickens for eggs and meat, reused aluminum foil, and reused about everything else, too.

I wonder if another farmer, or an archaeologist at some point in time, will find her vertical tunnel of trash with its green and blue bottles. The glass will last forever.

Along a creek, an albino sycamore, having shed its bark, stands out in the gray huddle of trees. Its bone-white trunk shouts like an exclamation mark.

A hawk facing north made no progress against the strong wind; he simply flew in place over a barbed-wire fence.

While driving on Kansas roads, we are gifted with distance, thus the ability to focus our vision near or far. Our eyes land on a century-old farmhouse, or on hedge apples lying in the ditch, or on a simple green patch of wheat. And our minds take it from there.

Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh