By KAREN MADORIN
For those who enjoy time out of doors: wandering or driving rural roads, walking pastures and creek banks, and taking a close look at Mother Nature’s artistic endeavors, autumn offers one masterpiece after another.
While spring time provides tender green tree leaves, grasses, and emerging crops along with subtle pastel wildflowers, the later "brrrr" months intensify color enough to satisfy a jaded eye. Take a country walk or drive that follows a creek or river, and let this creative genius dazzle you.
This year, it seemed like summer would last forever, and during a drive home from Salina a couple of weeks ago, I wondered if we’d see any fall color this year.
Unlike the interminable warm weather, once autumn fell, she collapsed. Our ash tree switched from green hues to eye-popping gold overnight. I thought we’d celebrate a seasonal change of attire for at least a week or two, but no—strong winds switching from south, north, east, and west swiftly pared once leafy branches to bare limbs and branches.
That doesn’t mean Ma Nature’s show is over.
Take a drive through farm country. Last summer’s corn stalks work like a fancy restaurant’s palate cleanser to neutralize expectations of brilliant color.
Let sensory balancing occur and prepare to savor every shade of milo standing in the fields. Each year, I’m stunned by the color varieties this annual crop produces—everything from deep magenta, red, dark rust, brilliant orange red, just orange, light rust, tawny tan, olive, and this year we noticed a chocolate brown addition. Add a flock of squawking black birds, and MN hands you a 3-D masterpiece.
If you manage to watch a harvest, relish every moment. Yeah, they’re dusty and for some, extremely allergenic, requiring viewing through swollen eyes and over wadded tissues. Watching full-to-the-brim combines pour bazillions of grain particles appearing as a flood of thick liquid into a grain cart is magical. No one in their right mind would ask for a sip, but it puts a person in mind of ultra-rich coffee, tea, or cocoa.
If the fields of milo were not eye candy enough, drive by local elevators.
Once towering cylinders fill, farmers unload seasonal harvests in increasingly growing piles around those Great Plains skyscrapers. As augers funnel more and more milo onto each grain mountain, they shift and blend to form amazing abstract art. Despite the fact only milo forms these structures, every pile differs. The combination of colors, sizes, and shapes creates an art display outside towering elevators.
These milo piles remind me of Navajo sand paintings. Though I claim no understanding of religious beliefs or spirituality behind that native art form, I respect that these paintings deal with prayer and healing.
How can anyone look at something so natural and fleeting and not experience holy appreciation, astonishment, or peace? Milo fields and piles with their amazing designs offer me a similar reaction—a moment to focus on God’s creation and enjoy His majesty.
Karen Madorin is a retired teacher, writer, photographer, outdoors lover and sixth-generation Kansan.