growing wheat

This afternoon I went out for a walk in the country. I walked in a field, along the edge of a field of wheat about 10 inches tall. The wind was the sort of wind that says Kansas when you hear it blowing against the fresh leaves of wheat, surprisingly nearly the same sound the wind makes when the wheat is ripe, I hadn't noticed that before.

And the dirt. As I was walking back to the pasture from which I entered the field I noticed the soft dirt, mellowed by many nights of freezing temperatures and wet days thereafter. This is the sort of dirt that makes one smile. Occasionally there would be a clod about the size of a tennis ball; stepping on it is like stepping on...a piece of foam, I don't know--can't think of a better image than that at the moment, but it just gives way to your weight in a way that you don't expect, because it's a big clod and when it was originally formed--some months before, September perhaps--it was hard and you would've felt it in your foot, but now it just squishes down like a piece of foam under your foot.