A corn field on highway 85 and some crazy sky

Though the 50 mph wind and tornado warnings of the day make me slightly wary, today I post in honor of beautiful yellow and green prairie plains.

Sweet Clover grows wild like grass here. Ranchers hay it for cattle feed and I stand on the side and take pretty pictures of it!

I was suspect that the colors would change and I would someday feast my eyes on something other than brown in these parts, but I have been proven wrong. I couldn’t let the summer slip away without showing you some of the gorgeous country side I have been seeing.

The landscape is not a familiar beauty to me, but rather a new beauty that I am pleased to have a moment to admire.

I grew up in the Seattle area, where you couldn’t see for miles in any direction because of all the trees! Green everywhere, in every season, seemed to be the state color. To my eyes that was beauty. Green mountains and trees.

When I was sixteen years old we moved to Northern California and when I first arrived I looked at the rolling hillsides with disappointment. The golden hills did not look beautiful to me, they looked naked. They looked like a poodle right after its curls are shaved off. Slowly though, my eyes adjusted and my world view expanded and I started to notice beauty there. All of the different shades of gold that the hills transitioned through. New species of trees, more bare yes, but interesting. So many wild flowers grew on those hill sides as well. And the sun showed up, everyday, without fail. By the time I moved away just 2 years later, I loved those hills.

Then I moved to Utah. I remember as a kid visiting family there and curling my nose up at the brown mountains. I was used to looking at Mount Rainier each day but here I saw these massive mountain with so many rocks exposed. And there were so many mountains, all in a big long line, surrounded by deep bare valleys. When I went to Utah for college I started to spend a significant time in those mountains. I hiked, I biked. My love story, falling for my husband, is set to the back drop of those mountains. Now I miss them, I yearn for them.

My point is, sometimes beauty is an acquired taste. Your eyes can become used to seeing one view. Your life, good things and good memories happen in that scenery. It doesn’t mean that other landscape is bad or ugly, it’s just foreign, your eyes haven’t had a chance to acclimate.

I am going through that process here. My eyes are acclimating. Of course when I go to Seattle the trees, the deep green, takes my breath away. When I went to Utah this summer the mountains nearly made me cry. When I think of Northern California I long to be riding a bike through those hot pretty hills. Maybe someday I will think of the plains, long fields of wheat, rocky badlands, and a piece of my heart will be here as well.

Sunflower Field