I finally went for a walk, around the corner and north of town, to look at the cornfield. My neighbor was hosting a birthday party for her granddaughter -- balloons, a few streamers. There were five or six kids at her house. They were lining up on her porch, taking turns trying to drop wooden clothespins into a mason jar. The music of children's shouts and laughter.
I got to the field and looked over the nearly golden sea. The sun was setting and it was getting cool. A half-ton truck came slowly around the corner and crept toward me. The driver's window was rolled down. He was a man in his 60s, a farmer. We nodded to each other.
"You see the news today?" he asked.
"Yes I did."
He put the truck in park, but left the motor idling. He was looking at the field, too.
"Quite the thing," he said. And it was.
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"On the plains ... we also treasure our world-champion slow talkers, people who speak as if God has given them only so many words to use in a lifetime, and having said them they will die."
- Kathleen Norris, from Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
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