Sleepless summer nights

Strange how, on some nights, you simply can't fall asleep.

It's happened to me tonight. I have the next two days off, so I can't say I'm stressing about work. Then again, since this will be Monday, maybe my brain is subconsciously preparing for a work week that won't start just yet for me. I don't know.

So I have made some hot tea....decaf, of course......in the hope that it will help me nod off.

Along the way I have prayed, reflected, pondered friendships....let my mind drift wherever it wanted to go in the hope that I would eventually arrive at eine gute schlafe. A good sleep.

Summer nights can do that to me. They're warm, inviting, alluring in how comfortable they can feel after a long, hot day.

Yes, it's Memorial Day weekend, but today sure had "summer" stamped on it with temperatures in the 90s and a blasting south wind I usually feel in July.

Maybe that's why I can't sleep --- because my body is sensing that shift in the seasons. Already.

Spring, we barely had a chance to get acquainted. Come back soon.

Summer's swan song

If the sharp angle of the afternoon shadows wasn't enough to tell me summer was near its end, the combines in the corn fields clinched it.

I was heading to the farm for the 50th anniversary of the church where Mom now attends Mass, and I was surprised to see so much harvesting going on already. Some fields had already been shorn, stalks sprouting from the ground like a few days' worth of beard stubble.

Fields of milo looked ready for the reaper weeks ahead of when they typically are, bright crimson heads leaning slightly under the weight of the imminent harvest.

As my drive continued past the checkerboard of row crops, I remembered an article I read recently about the 2009 grape harvest in the Bordeaux region of France. The piece was an early assessment of the wines produced from last year's harvest, and how the weather leading up to and throughout the growing season affected the quality and flavor of the grapes.

I've always been fascinated by how a vintage can be affected by something as seemingly innocuous as a week of hot weather and cloudless skies, or a shower on just the right - or wrong - day.

Farmers in the wheat belt know all about how significant a timely shower can be for a wheat crop; or how 10 days of hot, dry weather just as the wheat heads are filling out can cripple a yield.

But vinyards are a more vulnerable tapestry, and the wines they produce are time capsules - weather-engraved snapshots of years gone by....

Rumbles and reflections

The skies rumbled as I walked into the mall, and I had a feeling the clouds would be weeping by the time my tasks were completed.

I was right. It was a warm, steady rain, and if it weren't for the frequent claps of thunder - which meant lightning wasn't far off - it would have been tempting to just stroll among the rain drops.

A summer shower is an amazing thing, if you slow down enough to pay attention to it. A summer rain shower engages all five senses in a marvelous way.

You have the sound of the thunder as the storm approaches, the sight of lightning flashes if it's a thunderstorm, the smell of the coming rain, air so humid you can reach out and touch it.

A summer shower is an orchestra of sounds. Pick up the distinction between rain drops hitting tree leaves, or bark, or bare ground or cement There's a ping, a pock, a thud, a slap. Steady rain on hard surfaces sounds like applause, as if the crops and lawns and landscaping are thrilled to be receiving moisture.

A rain is nature's way of washing the landscape's face, leaving behind a freshness - almost a newness. Plants are invigorated, colors revived, spirits cleansed.....it never gets old.

When I hear the elderly talk about things they miss when they've been in nursing homes a while, a summer shower is often on their list.

A couple of times in the past few weeks I've spotted people sitting on their covered porches during summer showers --- just watching and listening.

How I envied them.

A little bit of homemade stew

Idle thoughts on a wide range of topics....

I don't know why, but I almost always do a double-take when I see the moon on a clear night. It doesn't matter if it's just a sliver or full and glowing, there's something about seeing the moon that makes me pause and ponder for a few moments --- and sometimes longer.

* * *

I must be watching too much soccer on TV. The other day on one my evening walks I strolled past an after-school soccer practice among middle school students and watched one kid after another sky their shots far over the crossbar as they accepted crosses from out wide. "You're leaning back as you shoot," I thought. "Straighten up."

Not that I'd ever want to coach soccer. I'll leave that to others with more patience than me.

* * *

Summer's departure always saddens me. Maybe it's my farming background, but I recognized summer as growing season, and nature flashing its nurturing potential. Sure, winter has its beauty and its purpose, but summer feeds us. Summer warms us. Summer presents the trees and the grass and the flowers in full glory.

I realize one of the keys to an enriched life is to find the beauty available in every season...but I still miss summer when it bids us farewell......

* * *

I spent some time with my godson, Anthony, looking at the photos of his school trip to Europe this summer. It was a remarkable trip, to Ireland, England, France, Belgium and Holland...all to places I have not visited. He had a lot of fun, for which I was grateful, and it was as entertaining to hear his stories as it was to see the photos.

It makes me want to find my passport and head over the pond again...

The dregs of summer television

Beach soccer?
On television???

And they're serious?

Sorry, I just can't hate summer

I've been hearing a lot of people talk over the past few weeks about how much they hate summer.


I'm sorry, I just can't join in that chorus.

Maybe it's the farm boy in me, but summer means abundant sunshine and growing season and nature in its full glory: trees and plants and crops and calves and colts and kittens and piglets and puppies.

It means blossoming gardens and vibrant lawns and warm nights and showers that can seem to wash the day clean and make everything fresh. It means ice cream sounds right almost every night and fresh corn on the cob can call my name countlessly. It means barbecues and baseball and easy banter into the evening.

Sure, it also means heat waves and hail storms and maybe even a few tornadoes - but every season has its thorns.

We couldn't live without summer - both literally and figuratively. So count me not with summer's boo-birds.

I'll be over in the Halleluiah Chorus instead.

Reflections on a summer Saturday

I would be returning to the city later in the day, but buckets of freshly picked ears of sweet corn demanded my attention at this given moment on our family farm.


I stripped husks from the ears, eliciting screeching sounds from the leaves as I pulled. Silk clung stubbornly and stickily to the yellow kernels.


A southerly breeze suddenly appeared, notable not just for the cool freshness on my back but for the way it clattered through the trees in the yard.


This, I thought as I glanced up, is summer in full blossom. As the wind whipped through the leaves, it sounded much like raindrops on a roof...or applause building, peaking and ebbing at a stage show.

Off to the east, clouds were erupting and darkening, and I knew Larned and Great Bend would soon get rain. Rarely is moisture unwelcome in farm country - when it halts a harvest, say, or aggravates a flooding risk - but I knew farmers east of our place would smile even as the sky grew increasingly angry.

These weren't tornado clouds, they were just a hearty summer shower in the making. My goddaughter, Rachel, was helping me clean the corn, and I told her to close her eyes and listen...to the wind, the leaves, the birds.

To summer.

"Oh, yeah," she said after several moments, a smile spreading on her face. "That's cool."

A total headache

Well, as I suspected, that hail storm last Wednesday totaled my Mercury Sable. An All-State agent confirmed that for me.


Now I wait to hear from someone else what they'll pay me for my 10-year-old car. I may end up being able to buy a cup of coffee with that check.


But here's the thing: except for the cracked windshield, the car still runs and rides well...so I'm sorely tempted to keep it and drive it for a while, even though it looks like somebody attacked it with a ballpeen hammer.


Given the doldrums of the current economy and the cutbacks so many businesses have had to make - including newspapers - I'm reluctant to dole out a bunch of money for a new set of wheels.

I guess that's the farm boy in me: if it still works well, why toss it aside? Let's hope I get a lot more miles out of that Sable, dents and all.

The song of the cicadas

I went for a walk tonight, chased to the dying moments of sunlight by the day's unyielding heat. As I strolled through the residential streets surrounding my apartment complex, I heard the song of the cicadas.

As a child, I always associated that sound with the arrival of August - which, with school days just around the corner, meant the departure of summer.

Oh, not the summer's heat, but the 'freedom' of the season. Summer meant no classes, no long bus rides, no homework or interminable list of math equations to tackle.

Not that we ever had the freedom to while away those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer that I heard about in song, and from the stories of those who grew up in the city. On the farm there were always chores to do, and the older we got the more work there was to be done.

But summer still meant the lunch break could be two hours if the heat was especially intense, and if we needed 10 minutes to get a drink of water and catch our breath, we could do that.

Summer also meant you would likely be out in the field or the barn or the yard in a place where you could watch the traffic flash by on the state highway or the horses frolic in the pasture or birds flittering about in the trees - all sights denied you when you were locked away in a classroom somewhere.

I guess that's why the sound of cicadas always filled me with a sense of sadness as a youth, coming as they typically did so late in a child's summer. And that old melancholy flashed tonight when I heard them again - even though we haven't even reached the midpoint of July yet.

So sing a song of summer, cicadas. You don't have to mean "farewell."

How hot is it?

It's so hot that as I stood in the Best Buy parking lot this afternoon I felt like a sausage being cooked on a massive Teflon frying pan.

It's so hot I thought my tennis shoes would melt even as I stood there.

It's so hot that I could feel the heat radiating from me even as the AC in my apartment hummed and hummed and hummed.

I'm guessing Wichita hit 103 today...which would be the hottest day of the year here.

But you know what? It's July in Kansas. That means summer. And summer means some days are going to be mighty hot. I'd still take this over winter....any time.

Morning thunder

Thunder rumbled with the dawn, and then a heavy rain started pounding the roof like a sudden ovation at a concert.

Lightning flashed, its bright intensity defying the window curtains and snapping me more quickly awake than I wanted to be.

No need for an alarm clock on this Friday morning.

But the rain and the lightning didn't last long. By the time I was leaving for the office, the rain had ended and patches of clear sky were visible.

The trees, the flowers, the bushes all looked freshly washed and sparkling in the splotchy morning sunshine. The air was clear and smelled wonderfully fresh, and I wondered how many photographers were drooling at the prospect of shooting images moments after a summer shower had passed.

As I turned onto the street, road crews were on the phone - almost assuredly to supervisors - to discuss the lakes that their holes in the asphalt had become. I'm sure they weren't asking for fishing poles.

Driving to the office, I noticed disintegrating cumulus clouds in the upper atmosphere and light wisps of cottony cirrus clouds flying beneath them toward the north at a lower altitude. Any teacher wanting to demonstrate how the atmosphere is like several layers of air stacked atop each other would only need that scene to demonstrate the point.

Already the morning sun was warm. I would have loved to sit on a porch with a cup of coffee and my laptop and soak in this pleasing summer song of a day. But I didn't have that luxury.

It was a disappointment to have to step inside. Anywhere.

Cutting in line

Ever since I got the phone call about George Tiller being shot on Sunday morning, the week had been a blur. Meals were afterthoughts at best.

By Thursday, I knew I had to pry myself away long enough for a trip through a drive-through lane. I turned into the McDonald's at Broadway and Waterman, and was thankful that the line wasn't long. Of course, it shouldn't have been, since it was already approaching 1:30 p.m.

As I crept forward in the line, a battered pickup that looked like its replacement parts were being held together by duct tape and rust drove forward perpendicular to the drive-through lane. I thought she was wanting to cut through the line and exit the lot - but she turned in front of me.

I growled under my breath, in part because I was really hungry (and I get grumpy when I am really hungry) and because I knew I needed to get back to the office quickly.

But as I idled in line, with the windows down in anticipation of placing my order, I could hear her pickup's engine huffing and puffing like a 3-pack-a-day smoker hiking in the Cascades. It sounded like it would give out any second.

The pickup itself looked like an amalgamation of second-hand parts, with a bumper dangling at one corner. Her clothes were dirty and faded. By the time she placed her order, all she asked for was an apple pie. At lunch time. It made me wonder if that's all she could afford.

As I took in the totality of it all, my anger dissipated like a puddle of water on a sunny June day. If anything, this woman deserved my sympathy. Even if her order was merely dessert for a more balanced meal she'd had earlier, it was clear she was struggling just to get by.

And I surely didn't need to add to her burden.

A layer of bricks

I went for a walk tonight, eager to enjoy a sunny, pleasant summer evening and clear my head a little from the frenzy of news coverage in which I've been immersed since abortion doctor George Tiller was shot to death Sunday morning.

It wasn't a long walk, really...a little over a mile through the neighborhood that surrounds my apartment complex. I heard the clinks of a pair of men pitching horseshoes in a front yard, the idle bark of a fenced-in dog, the rustle of a woman working on the landscaping next to her house.

But what caught my eye was a torn-up street in front of my complex - or, to be more precise, the layer of bricks that was now exposed as workers had stripped away the decaying asphalt they plan to replace. The bricks were small, packed tightly together, and often on their sides - as if to fill uneven spaces.

And suddenly I was taken back to a story I wrote about paving bricks I wrote as an intern for the Larned Daily Tiller & Toiler nearly 30 years ago now. Larned's side streets are almost entirely brick, and driving over them delivered an almost staccato rumble that seemed to me the automotive version of the lulling clackety-clack of the railroad tracks for a train.

I found myself wondering what year those bricks had been laid, and thumbed through the sheafs of knowledge in my memory to see if I could recall much of what I learned about paving bricks. Bricks used for streets were different than those used for houses, because they needed to stand up to the weight of persistent traffic.

Alas, I couldn't spot any identifying markers in the bricks on Douglas, so all I could do was guess at their age. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they dated back 80 years or more, to the era of the flappers and Calvin Coolidge and vaudeville. Back then, this would have been close to the western edge of the city. After all, West Street is less than a mile away.

Soon enough, they'll be covered up again, by a fresh layer of pavement that's smoother to drive on and easier on tires. But I've long believed brick streets have more personality, and I'll be sorry to see them vanish.

A tip of the hat to spring

Spring has finally arrived here in southern Kansas.

How do I know? Today was the first time I wore a straw fedora to work. It's strictly warm-weather apparel.

I have more than a half-dozen hats, most of them made of felt. Almost all of them are fedoras, because I love the classic look of them.

They've become a personal trademark, though that wasn't my intent when I bought my first one more than 20 years ago. I just wanted a stylish way to keep my head warm in the fall and winter. Then, of course, I needed something to shield my face from the merciless summer sun. That's where the straw fedoras stepped in.

Oh, I have other hats for summer labor, including one I call my Aussie outback hat. The "breezer," which has a mesh crown to allow air to keep your head cool, is another warm-weather favorite.

Hopefully I won't have to buy any for a while, because I already fill a couple of hat racks with my horde of haberdashery.