September is yellow time

  • sunflowers1.jpgOrig­i­nally posted in 2008, this ode to the yel­low seemed worth a re-run.

    Dri­ving home from church, I kept notic­ing the banks of wild sun­flow­ers at each new rise in the road. They sur­prise me every year: It’s too late for bunches and bunches of bright yel­low sun­flow­ers to appear in every gully, mass­ing out of weedy grass like some­thing in a pop-up book. Shouldn’t they be a mid-summer thing, a July 4th thing?

    Obvi­ously, I don’t know what I’m talk­ing about. (Not sur­pris­ing.) The sun­flower is Kansas’ state flower, but appar­ently a cou­ple adven­tur­ous immi­grants crossed the state line and brought a LOT of friends. And if it’s not the sun­flow­ers, it’s gold­en­rod or yel­low daisies or black-eyed Susans. What­ever secret lan­guage it is that God uses for flow­ers, He seems to have informed all the yel­low ones to report for duty. I’m going to drive off the road one day if I keep gawk­ing at them all, but they’re so beau­ti­ful.

    Some­times these days I mis­take the turn­ing corn stalks for more flow­ers, because they’ve passed through the riotous growth of sum­mer — sprout­ing, shoot­ing up and grow­ing big ears of corn overnight, it seems. Now the whole stalk is started to look a lit­tle tired. The spi­dery tas­sels have drooped and the leaves are begin­ning to turn (of course) yel­low. It would be a ter­ri­ble waste if you wanted to have corn on the cob, but since 99.9% of this corn is seed corn, it won’t be har­vested until it’s so dry and brown that the leaves rat­tle in the wind. It’ll be ugly then, but now it’s just a back­drop. The ambers and ecrus of the corn stalks com­ple­ment the golds and cit­rons of the wildflowers.

    And it’ll get more dra­matic. The next to be called into yel­low­ness will be the soy­bean fields, and that will really be pretty. Soy­beans are the sec­ond most pop­u­lar crop here, and you see wide rolling vis­tas of the thick, shrubby, shinbone-high soy­bean plants. But soy­beans need to be totally dried out to har­vest as well, which means that some­day soon, we’ll see the first lit­tle freck­les of crayon-yellow in the field. Then the spots will get a lit­tle big­ger and a lit­tle closer together. And then sud­denly, like an epi­demic, the entire hill will flush with sweep­ing yellow.

    Hon­est to good­ness, it’s the kind of thing that makes me wish I was inter­ested in plein-air paint­ing. I’ve tried to pho­to­graph it all — the sun­flow­ers, the corn, the soy­beans — but it never comes out right. It all looks too small on a lit­tle pho­to­graph, and the col­ors look too puny. Some things you just have to see in person.

    Who knew God could do so much with just one color?


    Related posts:

    1. Sun­day after­noon in September
    2. Late Sep­tem­ber
    3. Sat­ur­day morn­ing in September
    4. Elder Por­phyrios, in praise of nature and industry
    5. Flow­ers for Maiden Mary

    September 5th, 2011 | Grace | No Comments |

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