Later That Evening

There was a slight mist over the fields when I took the boys out to pee. The evening sky had stars peaking through a thin layer of clouds, and made me feel - just for a moment - calm, and happy. As my senses adjusted to the atmosphere, the individual parts of this nocturnal moment began to separate themselves and become more distinct. From the cupola of our barn the steady squawk of a parenting barn owl mingles with the muffled base line of some band warming up for the annual logging show this weekend. A wall of grass stalks is visible just at the edge of illumination cast from the motion light that the dogs triggered on their way off the porch. Out “there” at the edge, where things get soft and gray, the grass blurs as if in slight motion, and meets the infinite dark above as a fuzzy but definite line. I’m sure prescription glasses would clear this whole thing up.

The field grass is tall. Unusually tall; taller than I am. The farmer that hays our field missed the last window of sun, and the rain has dispensed with any notion of starting the methodical events that result in baled hay. “Make hay while the sun shines”– not a casual quip to a farmer. I’m always a little sad when the fields are eventually cut, as I like the cloistered feeling of being nearly surrounded; hugged by thousands of living sentinels. As a crop, this mass of verticalness arrives every year with unfailing regularity. They can’t help but reach for the sun, until a heavy rain or wind bends them in half, and their perfectly level heads, no longer form that wonderfully fuzzy horizon line against the dark firs the flank two sides of our property.