an old round barn

an old round barn

with diamond windows commands

a windswept prairie hill

This beautiful round barn sits in open farmland miles from Salem, Iowa, the nearest small town. Commanding a windswept prairie hill, the barn looks like a copper fortress studded with diamond-shaped windows and topped with a silver silo projecting through the roof. It is in such good condition that it's hard to believe it was probably built in the early 1900s, during the heyday of circular barns. 
          This barn seems to be a well-preserved example of a type of round barn construction found mainly in Iowa, built with hollow clay tiles. It may be one of sixteen barns believed to have been built by the Johnston Brothers Clay Works of Fort Dodge in 1915. In Iowa's prairie region there were few trees but lots of high-quality clay. Manufacturers developed a hollow clay tile that became extremely popular for building silos. Soon after, the construction of round, hollow tile "silo" barns took hold.
          The  era of round barns came to an end with the advent of mechanized agriculture, which was more suited to the rectangular barn design. It's good that this old barn has been maintained with such care. Its longevity and elegant design makes it a true gem of the prairie.

sunshine falls in silver

sunshine falls in silver

bars through rafters, lighting

the dark interior

The abandoned barn on Pleasant Plain Road still shelters life. When I approach, a fox the color of field corn dashes from under a wagon into a hole beneath the broken floor boards. The old barn, its red paint fading to a blush, has been slowly collapsing for years. The roof sags like a swayback cow. Most of the cedar shake shingles are missing. Inside, sunshine falls in silver bars through the rafters, lighting the dark interior. Everything slants -- doors, windows, walls, posts, beams. Crow's hybrid corn signs lie higgledy-piggledy on the floor, the only spot of color against the worn-out wood. 
          Crow's, Dekalb, Pioneer, Garst, Northrup -- during the growing season, these eye-catching signs march along the highway at the end of corn rows to advertise demonstration plantings of hybrid seed. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 95 percent of our corn acreage is planted to hybrid corn, which produces at least 20 percent more corn on 25 percent fewer acres than in 1930 when hybrid corn seed became widely available. Of course, nearly all of the large-scale hybrid field corn is destined to be used as livestock feed, a long journey from corn's beginnings as open-pollinated Indian maize, grown for human consumption.

through a black tunnel

through a black tunnel

following strands of gold to

light at the far end

On a cold winter's day I stop at a farmer's coop to look at some rolls of black plastic pipe tied into enormous bales as big as a one-story house. The gold cord binding each bale of corrugated pipe makes a pattern like a spider web, but the center of the web is empty, a dark tunnel with a blinding bright light at the far end. It's early January, a time for reflection, of looking back at where we've been and looking forward to where we're going. While I'm standing in the cold looking through a giant tube, I start musing about time being like this tunnel. We can't always see clearly where we came from or where we're going, but if we look closely, we find golden guidelines and bright glints highlighting the ups and downs of the path, with glimpses of light at both ends.

near Osceola

near Osceola

a nest in a cherry tree with

one broken blue egg

Late November, Cornelian cherries hang on the tree, attracting birds with their bright red color. I, too, am drawn to the clusters of vermilion fruit. And so I spot, through the branches bare of leaves, an old Robin's nest. In the bottom, nestled in the grass lining, one blue egg, pecked open, the remains of yolk lacquering the inside of the shell. Winter winds will blow the nest to the ground. Its crumbling contents -- mud, grass, egg shell, dried yolk -- will become mulch for the grass that will line another nest in the spring.

sultry daylily

sultry daylily 

days – each fragile flower blooming

by day just one day

Grandma's frilly double orange daylilies are blooming profusely in this intense heat and humidity, bursting open in rapid succession like a fireworks display. All that work for only one glorious day, since each blossom has just one day to fulfill its primary purpose. The flower opens at sunrise and withers at sunset. If it is successfully pollinated, a seed pod will form when the flower drops off. If not, another bud on the same scape will open the next day, and this succession of flowers continues for many days. The genus name for the daylily, Hemerocallis, comes from the Greek words The genus name for the daylily, Hemerocallis, from the Greek words hēmera (day) and kalos (beautiful). These perennial plants are native to China, Japan and Korea, where pinyin (yellow needles) are used in Asian cuisine. Grandma used all parts of the plant: fresh and slightly withered flowers as well as new leaf shoots in salads, dried flowers as a thickener in soups, and boiled roots in stews, while a tea made from the roots was used as a diuretic and mild laxative. I like to eat both buds and blossoms right off the plant, consuming the beautiful day.

peeling paint shadows

peeling paint shadows,

afterimage of old wooden 

stairwell on brick wall

Old wooden stairwells clinging to the outside of brick buildings were once used for accessing the second floor. But time and weather have rotted the wood to the point of liability, so all over town they are being torn down. The once-a-door on this building has been blocked on the outside with a block of wood and covered with plastic, so hopefully no one will fall out. Colorful remnants of paint where the stairs once climbed this brick wall now look like an abstract mural. I am glad no one has painted over it.

summer-hot spring night

summer-hot spring night

art walk, flying leap walking

art, two novel works

Early June, feels like August. Afternoon sun cooked the rain-soaked ground, steaming the air. First Friday of the month, so everyone turns out for Art Walk on the town square. Several bands in the bandstand, lots of food vendors, street vendors, all the galleries open. At The Crest Jewel, an exhibit of Rachel's unique handmade felt hats draws a crowd, or maybe it's the artist, immobile as a mannequin, wired into a fantastic costume. Though skimpy, the wool must be quite hot in the narrow shop packed with sweaty bodies. Rachel takes a break to climb the narrow flight of stairs to Flying Leap, where there's an exhibit on time travel, to show her futuristic outfit to Donna, the owner, who's wearing her own unique version of walking art.

three bathing beauties

three bathing beauties

spreading their wings to the sun

warm gravel road

Another thunderstorm with torrential wind and rain in the morning. Up comes the sun and warms up all the rain, and the butterflies and moths flutter about, looking for a dry patch of ground to warm their fragile bodies. Walking to the mailbox, they keep flying up at my feet, flitting up and down and circling around me. I stop and wait patiently for them to settle down, hopefully within zoom range. It takes a lot of patience and breath holding to capture a few images. A couple of trucks pass by, disturbing my subjects so that I must wait and slowly stalk them again. I must look strange, standing on the road, with my camera pointed at what appears to be empty gravel road. The mostly black butterfly is a Black Swallowtail, a female, identified by the showy band of iridescent blue along the outer edge of her wings. She feeds on the nectar of purple clover, thistles and milkweed. The tiger-striped yellow butterfly is an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. This one is also a female, showing off her iridescent blue scales and orange marginal spot on her hind wings. She feeds on the nectar of lilac and wild cherry blossoms abundant here in late May and early June. The spotted orange butterfly also appears to be a swallowtail, but after an online search through the image gallery of Iowa butterflies that has taken me longer than the time it took to take the photos, I'm still not certain of its identity.

yellow crop duster

yellow crop duster

flying low, spraying sprouting 

corn with toxic brew

It's a clear, windless day in Iowa. As we drive into town, we see a little yellow bi-plane flying extremely low over a field of newly sprouted corn. The wheels are down, as if it's about to land, but then it banks sharply, turns and comes back down for another pass. We are now driving parallel to the aircraft, close enough to see a stream of foggy white spray spewing from the back end. Ah, Spring and pesticides are in the air. It's a crop duster, trying to get ahead of the bugs and fungus that plague hybrid corn, and probably adding a dose of fertilizer for this nutrient gobbling crop. Aerial application of pesticides has been around since the 1920s. Environmental concerns about spray drift, soil contamination, water pollution, occupational diseases such as cancer eventually led to greater regulation and greater precision of application. As long as corn is king in Iowa, the practice will be supported by agribusiness, but an increasing number of small organic farmers who want to protect their crops are making their voices heard too. 

Memorial Day

Memorial Day,

hundreds of flags fill the square,

vet proudly posing

Memorial Day, national day of remembrance. All of my uncles served in the military during World War II. My father, a chemist, was considered too valuable to draft, so he stayed home and worked for the government on a secret project. My Uncle Harry went into the Air Force and qualified to be a pilot or a navigator. After pilot training, he opted for navigator training, which would take another six months and allow him more time with his new bride. His plane was shot down over Italy. They landed unharmed near a village, not knowing what their reception might be, but were welcomed as liberators. My uncle, not used to drinking wine, got drunk and fell into the water trough. Uncle Harry could have passed for Clark Gable and we kids idolized him as a dashing, romantic hero. Fortunately, all of my uncles came back alive and in one piece, though none of them would ever talk about painful memories of the war.

bluebird with beak full

bluebird with beak full

of fine long grasses gathered

for lining her nest

Diane Porter took this adorable photo of a bluebird carrying an amazing load of grass to her nest. How could she gather so much grass in her tiny beak? Did she pick up each stem one by one? What would keep them from falling out when she picked up the next one? Or did she manage to scoop the entire bundle up at once? The incongruity of a bird with what appears to be long whiskers makes me wonder if she might have been a cat in her last life, perhaps a cat that caught a little bluebird on the way to her nest.

milk snake curving back

milk snake curving back

on sinuous red blotches,

checkerboard belly

Werner Elmker took this photo of a beautiful milk snake he came across in the evening on the trail near the arched bridge over the highway on the outskirts of town. I have occasionally encountered these reclusive snakes, but had never seen the black-and-white checkerboard belly. Once in early spring I pulled back a piece of cardboard mulch in the garden and found a milk snake curled up on top of her clutch of eggs. My grandmother claimed that a milk snake would sneak into the barn and "milk" the Jersey cow at night. However, snakes drink only water and it's hard to imagine any cow putting up with those sharp teeth! If a milk snake is in a barn, it's probably hunting for rodents, its main diet. The milk snake, a type of kingsnake, is nonvenomous and kills by constriction, unlike the coral snake, its poisonous look-alike. Coral snakes are not found in Iowa but are found in the Ozarks where our family vacationed. My father taught us how to distinguish friend from foe with the old adage, "red and yellow, kill a fellow, red and black, venom lack." Milk snakes are partially immune to the venom of poisonous snakes in their range, such as the timber rattlesnake, and will kill one if they meet, unless the rattler manages to defend itself by means other than biting.

five goslings marching

five goslings marching 

in a row guarded on both

ends by their parents

When I saw these Canada Geese on Adams' pond, about five miles from our place, I thought they might be the ones who went missing from the many little ponds in our neck of the woods, but when I looked closely I counted five goslings instead of four. Perhaps this is the same pair of geese who raised a family on this pond last year. When I first saw this flock, they were standing on the lawn, the parents guarding the youngsters while they nibbled grass. As soon as I stopped, the parents herded their offspring to the pond and they all paddled away to the far side. The goslings have grown quite a lot but are still covered with down and their stubby wings are unable to fly, so safety lies in vigilant parents and a big, sheltered pond.

temple of the sun

 
temple of the sun

resonates with the golden

flute of the traveler

Paul Horn, known as the Traveler, played his flute in the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu. He has also played in many sacred spaces around the world, including the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the Potala and Mt. Kailash in Tibet, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and with orca whales. It was "Inside" his recording in the Taj Mahal in 1968 that launched the genre of New Age music. Paul was with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, in 1967, at the same time as the Beatles and Donovan, and he became one of Maharishi's first teachers of Transcendental Meditation. This year Paul played in the Golden Dome on the campus of Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa. His soulful melodies on a golden flute reverberated in the atmosphere of deep, lively silence that permeates the Golden Dome.

a pair of wild geese

a pair of wild geese

guard their four fuzzy goslings

pecking by the pond

The big news in our neck of the woods is that a pair of Canada Geese hatched a brood of four goslings on Rusch's pond. In this photo, courtesy of Denyce, the gander stands guard on one leg while the goose takes a break from her goslings, who follow her in a line everywhere, in and out of the water. Only three of the goslings are visible near the water's edge, which may be why the gander is looking around for his wayward child. The goslings can't fly yet, but shortly after they were discovered they vanished from Rusch's pond. They were seen walking down the road. They were spotted at Jack and Ton's pond, about a quarter of a mile away. From there they relocated again, but where? Another neighbor says the parents visit their pond but he hasn't seen the babies. I have been on a wild goose chase for the past few days, with no more luck than my hunt for morels.

late winter birth time

late winter birth time –

ewe with twin lambs, black and white,

huddling by her side

A week before spring equinox, still below freezing at night, but it is birthing time for many animals living in the open. This ewe wears her thick winter coat but the lambs are born with only a light fleece. When I appear she is cropping the new shoots coming up through the dead grass while the twins lie by her side. The lambs scramble to their feet and huddle on either side of their mother, who lifts her head and gives me a hard stare.

cat walking in snow

cat walking in snow –

hind paws stepping precisely

in the front paw prints

 

Walking behind Ginger, I notice for the first time that his hind paws are stepping exactly in the prints left by his front paws. Even moving faster, he still leaves a trail of almost perfectly matched prints. There must be some evolutionary advantage to this method of walking, perhaps more silent when stalking. It is certainly efficient and also extremely elegant.

illusion of face

illusion of face

or illusion of tree bole –

do you see them both?

I always look for this face on one of the many a buckeye trees that grow in a flat area between hill and creek. Many trees have tree boles, some formed when bark grows over a broken branch, others caused by some kind of insect infestation. This one is very large and so old that it is so disintegrated that it looks like a skeleton's skull. After a snowstorm, it looks almost jaunty, topped by a white cap.

as days grow longer

as days grow longer,

husks split open, unfolding

seeds waiting to sprout

Snow resting as on top of the milkweed pods is as white and fluffy as the silken parachutes of the seeds, still waiting for wind to waft them away.