A Wild West summer of long ago

Thinking about a Wild West summer...

I would feel like I was going to melt into summer warmth. Magically, the sun is shining and the snow dissolves, leaving brown hues in its wake. The wind turns warm and humid, and is sparse. I question whether I really feel a breeze or it's so hot, I imagine a cooling presence. The cold air that had so frozen my lungs just that previous winter not so long ago, becomes hot and sticky, leaving me parched. Sweat immediately forms on my brow and I look over the brown fields, feeling the heat of the sun on my shoulders and the heat radiating up from the cooked cracked earth. Summer was having an intensity matched by nothing other than the fires of Hell.

The plains are still rolling and the shades of brown are many. The fields are dirty dark brown, and as the hills raise and lower, the hues become darker and lighter. The round bales of hay dot the landscape, giving it a polka dotted look. And the pattern of bales at first appears random, but upon closer examination the rows of bales are symmetrical and aligned, making a quilt like pattern across the otherwise unadorned fields, in a covering of summer.

The humidity and summer sun has done its job and cooked the earth until it cracked, leaving gouges running through the hardened, dried mud. Tractors and long ago rains worked together to leave the huge ruts, like craters, making the terrain uneven and broken, almost scarred. Not even the brilliant blue sky, like a tall drink of water, can ease the hotness, the lines of heat reverberating from the ground. The scrub brushes wilt in the mid day sun and not a tumbleweed blows across my path. The sage brush is limp, tired from the beating it received from the summer's intensity. Land as far as the eye can see, miles of brown with golden dots of hay, lasting forever, until it joins hands with the blue sky at the horizon.

Maggie