The grandchildren have gone home. We grandparents are sufficiently fatigued to the point of inactivity. (A fair accounting should reflect that my Beloved, with the help of our hard working son-in-law, dug two deep holes today and planted a couple sugar maples in the front yard. So whatever fatigue he’s feeling wasn’t only a by-product of enthusiastic grandchildren! But my, how they adore him and seek to be at his side wherever he is!)

I offer another post with poetry. If memory serves, this poem is the first (possibly second) sonnet I wrote many years ago. I think it still stands up to scrutiny. As someone with a love for all of God’s world, the night sky offers endless fascination and discovery!

As a child growing up in the midwest, this poem grew out of my recollections about circuses and the corn fields where they occasionally set up their tents. Those corn fields offered unique smells and sounds for someone like me, raised as a city girl.

We moved to the suburbs when I was twelve and right next to our house at the end of the development stood a huge corn field. In the summer, stalks grew high and we explored them as children are wont to do. In the winter, the stalks were mowed (mostly) but presented the challenge for a different experience. Just slogging through the mowed field turned into a game. Who could get the farthest the fastest?

The fields were also an ideal hiding place for rabbits and other small animals. At least once, I accompanied my older brother and his friends on a hunting “expedition” around the corn field. Why they invited me to come, I’ll never know! The boys brought clubs and I followed along, freezing (though heavily bundled against the elements), uncomfortable navigating over uneven muddy soil, and ambivalent about witnessing this age-old rite of passage. I think I wandered home after their third kill, not especially impressed by the blood trailing down a rabbit’s now-lifeless snout.

As young marrieds, my Beloved and I lived in Iowa (corn country for sure!) for about 30 months. Again, I recall the beauty of an expansive green cornfield stirred gracefully by a gentle wind. It’s peaceful, like waves on a calm sea. But following harvest time, the wind crackles through the stalks, disturbing them, cutting through with vengeance, just as the mowers will eventually do when plowing under what’s left after harvest.

There’s so much in this world that we miss because we’re too busy seeing through it, overlooking majesty and beauty in our quest for lesser things.

Of course the best show takes place in the skies above, when we take time to plunk down our back sides onto soggy ground and simply turn our eyes Heaven-ward.