From the clear light of morning, in Odessa, I could see we
had made our way out of the flatlands, and the topography began to rise and
fall as we crossed into Kansas. After a
several mile hike around Clinton Lake, just West of Lawrence, we entered an
almost surreal stretch of Turnpike, 40 miles without a house, barn or road
sign. I began to wonder if we were not
in Kansas anymore.
We made Mulvane in the early evening without incident and I
was taken with the seemingly diminished scale of a place well established in my
history.
Bernie Cummins, my cousin, took us for a hike, up 111th
Street East, passing the scene of a couple of my favorite accidents. We crossed
the bridge where I had set off a string of firecrackers in my shirt pocket, the
grove of hedgeapple trees, where there had once been only one, and I had backed
a tractor into it, an industrious and naïve youth of 12….
A frost had come through the night, and hit Bernie and
Jackie’s Hungarian pepper plants. Bernie and I picked most of the undamaged
bounty, with cherry tomatoes and other green peppers, Kaya on rabbit patrol,
running the dry arroyos.
We watched the Yankees vs. the Orioles, the second game of
the division series, an excellent game, and began thinking of the long day trip
to Denver tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment