As recently as 2018, if I’d been asked where, in the USA, corn is mostly grown, undoubtedly I would have said Iowa.
Not that I ever expended a lot of energy considering the matter, but you always see those photographs of corn fields stretching for miles across the flat plains of the heartland.
It isn’t that I was never in *New England at the right time of year, so I must just not have noticed the cornfields here. My excuse is that I had other pre-occupations.
It is truly an amazing thing, when the scales fall from your eyes and you become aware.
Really aware. I always noticed Nature, birds and animals, the landscape as a whole.
So, I saw Fall colours and fields of snow and I thought “how nice!”
But I realise now that I never felt Nature before
Back then, I would have crossly argued the point.
“Of course I feel it!”
In as much as I was able to, I did.
But when I came to live Upstate New York, it was as if my pores opened up.
At first, I thought I was intoxicated by the novelty and the adrenaline of the great cross-country move.
“In a month or two, it will wear off”, I thought.
“The first Winter ought to do it.”
Winter came and I delighted in it.
Snow! Bring it on! I laughed and could not get enough.
“Perhaps I’m going mad?” I asked myself.
A year went by and I experienced the four official seasons as well as what I think of as all the “mini seasons” that join them up.
It will be four years, at the end of September, since the scales fell off. I am not mad. I am really free for the first time in my life.
Having a companion who enjoys Nature in the same way has had a great deal to do with my experience.
It isn’t that I need companionship to feel what I do, but alone I would not be able to explore the countryside as I have, being somewhat “challenged”, one way and another.
It is good to have a second pair of eyes too, given that one cannot possibly take in everything at once. Grant and I often point things out to one another.
It’s handy also that we are drawn to the same sort of explorations.
This morning’s journey was not in fact, a so-called discovery trip, but merely doctor’s visit, however it was interesting to note the many changes that have occurred since our last “sortie”, just three weeks ago.
We have cornfields as far as the eye can see here too and I love to watch the many stages of their development.
What I really love about our cornfields is that they roll over the hilly landscape.
By corn I mean maize, of course, not the sort of corn I remember from the fields of England when I was a child.
Maize was something I first encountered in Cambodia.
You could buy it from a chap on the street where it was either grilled or boiled. Either way I loved it.
It has been a somewhat soggy day and the windshield kept getting wet. Usually I try to edit blemishes out but being short of time, I have left them.
Maybe they add to the atmosphere of the images.
The cornfields will certainly have been happy with their anointing.
.
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*New York is technically not part of New England, but I think of it that way as we are so close to the Vermont border!
Simply a maize ing!
I like to share what I see with someone (most of the time it’s with Berto). And we do see different things (though we are on the same path) and it’s great to share it between us. Thank you for sharing another drive with lovely views 🌸.
Glad to hear that you still enjoy your move to New York State, Carolyn. Around Beetley, most farmers grow Oil Seed Rape. It has the most wonderful luminous yellow colour, but sadly smells like urine.
Best wishes, Pete.
I didn’t realise it smelled like that. I used to love the sight when in an aeroplane coming into Heathrow.
Nice from a distance, but not pleasant close up.