Rye and alfalfa.

It's just now occurred to me that I write mostly about nature. I suppose I'm a hippie after all. People have been speculating on it for years. Because I'm thin. Because I occasionally wear my hair long and electric. Because I look as if I don't wear make-up*. Because I look like the sort of girl that doesn't eat hamburgers, though my close friends will attest to the contrary. I just happen to have a hippie sort of aura. I've never liked it. Hippies today, young hippies, are not real hippies. They're stoners and feneants. I am neither.

However, I do love nature. I wish sometimes that I could live in the thick of it like Thoreau. I'd like to live out of eyesight of EP Marts and Wal-marts and Chik-fil-a-s. I'd like to see a Cheshire moon unbound by dull yellow concrete slab faux Carpentiere style suburban dwellings. Or worse, peach brick rancheros. I'd like to nix the posts and poles and septic pumps altogether. Telephones lines gashing a sky full of verbena and lavender and drifting, symmetrical rays distress me to no end. I feel an over-whelming ire when I consider how much more pleasant the place would be without human witnesses.

I don't like that hippie-ness, but there it is.

Yesterday I took an unfamiliar road that led me through low-land swamps.

Tall gray nameless trees with no recognizable bark or leaves to identify them become stark stumps only when they reach telephone pole height. They stab at the sun. Shallow waters, amber and gleaming with tannins from roots and fallen limbs, sprout golden daffodils, and bowl-shaped, shining poppies spike through the shoulder of the road. Gray herons perch, still and lean, in the waters, one with similarly still, lean limbs and undergrowth. Crickets and frogs whistle and hum, hidden.

Nature seems surreal in its real-ness. I think sometimes that it must be impossible.