Monday, October 1, 2012

Along The Country Roads

Late Sunday afternoon we went for a drive along our country roads – the roads we seldom travel but know well.

Right away we came upon a magnificent display of my favorite autumnal wildflowers, the ashy sunflower. It is far more graceful than the better-known Maximilian sunflower. They are blooming in pastures and filled about eighty acres where the farmer's crop had failed in the drought. These are growing in a pasture.


Close up the ashy sunflower is as lovely as any garden cultivar.


We love the old back roads developed by the first settlers, winding around hillsides and through valleys. Dense woods of oak, shagbark hickory, elms and other trees overhang both sides of this road. In autumn Kansas native woods develop soft colors – yellow for the shagbark hickory and the black walnut, balanced by innumerable shades of russet for the many varieties of oaks.


The road ended at a high hill overlooking farmsteads sprinkled among fields and pasture and woods. This is the final resting place of many early settlers. It is called Colyer Cemetery, established in 1869. Ancient pine trees, many of them now dead, loom over the scattered gravestones.


Heaps of fallen bark from the dead trees littered the ground around their corpses. Up close I could see that the trees had been infested with beetles. Entropy sometimes is beautiful.


Walking around the cemetery, looking at gravestones, I was struck by the number of children buried here. Today the death of a child is unusual but the early settlers here commonly experienced that heartbreak, some families losing more than one child. Someone has replaced the original gravestone at this grave, so the inscription is easy to read. Sara, the firstborn died at age eight; the second, William, died at two-and-a-half; the third, Lillian, lived just eighteen months. Across these 140 years I feel the grief of their parents.


This original gravestone has discolored somewhat, but has not eroded as most of the old ones are. It tells of the death of a preteen. 


Being on that hilltop was utter peace. The air was still and cool, the sky lightly overcast. The only sound was a faint chirping of crickets. It seemed a good resting place. We might have been the only people on earth.

Returning to our car I realized that were were parked on a pasture of native grass and forbs. The pasture had been cut for hay early in the summer just before the drought and heat began. Now, with recent rains, my other favorite autumnal wildflower, blue sage, was blooming all around the area.


Normally blue sage, also called pitcher sage, grows to be as much as five feet tall. These plants are much shorter, less than twelve inches, both because they had been cut down once in the haying and because they had been deprived of moisture and been subjected to intense heat for several weeks. But here they are, casting a blue haze across the grasses. They are just one more example of life's persistent force. These plants, like people, come back year after year but, having a limited lifespan, make seeds that will produce the next generation.

Gosh, it was a perfect drive in the country on a Sunday afternoon.


Copyright, 2012 Shirley Domer

2 comments:

Jayhawk Fan said...

Beautiful photos. I especially love the country road with overhanging tree branches in all colors. The hill top cemetery is a bit too bleak for me to rest my eyes on for long! I wonder if you bothered to collect any seeds from the Ashy Sunflower?

Shirley said...

The seeds aren't ready yet, but I've written on my calendar, "Collect ashy sunflower seeds October 15." Hope they will be ready by then.