JOY ALONG THE WAY: GREEN TO AMBER WAVES OF GRAIN

America, America! Your wheat fields are singing a song. It is the sweet notes of the song sparrow and dickcissel and an occasional fly-over indigo bunting.

Our little, local snippets of wheat fields, compared to the endless stretches of those to the west and north are satisfying samples of the grassroots origin of our daily bread. One can encompass them with the eye, see the borders, store the pictures on the reels of the mind.

If you want to think Big while looking at the Little, look on the ready-to-harvest field and think of a lazy lion shaking its shaggy mane as breezes ripple through.

I like the wheat fields in all seasons. When the rich brown earth curls up behind the plow it speaks of the riches of America. Here is a gift of enormous proportions -- the means of a livelihood. When the little green sprouts appear they seem to shout, "See, we're here, just as was promised -- seed bearing its own kind within itself. Keep in touch. Watch us grow!"

When the supple stems are knee-high it is good to stand at field's edge and stare at the many shades of green that come billowing toward you. A green ocean! Should you stand your ground or run? Or walk on green water?

Look at a mature head of wheat that grows on the central stem. Are the grains not neat, chasing each other upward, almost piggy-back in their hurry, and in pleasing herringbone manner?

Had Holmes picked up a head of wheat instead of the chambered nautilus, he might have said, "Build theee more and more roomlets as you reach for the blue. Leave your husks behind and be my bread, please do."

Nah! Holmes wouldn't have written that.

Many there are who have never seen a shock of wheat except in pictures. Many there are who have never sat leaning against one, listening to the crickets fiddling somewhere within, and the plaintive call of the bobwhite whose landscape has been so rudely changed. It is a place to get away from it all, or get with it all, depending on your perspective.

Wheat is cool. Not as in the "cool" of teen-age description, but actually Fahrenheit cool. On hot summer days Lou and I played in the big, tin-lined wheat bin. We would bury ourselves in the grain as one would do with sand on a beach. It was even cooler than the breeze that seemed to always blow through the barn's central hallway.

Plunge your hand deep into the flour cannister any time of the year and feel the velvet coolness. I wondered about this powdery coolness for a long time. It would seem that the flour would achieve room temperature. One day I plunged a regular indoor thermometer into the flour and in 10 minutes it registered a half degree lower. Oh well, maybe the room temperature fell that much in 10 minutes. Hard to tell. Anyway, it was a cool experiment. Or maybe a "cool" experiment.

When flour is hot, as in a freshly baked, yeasty smelling loaf of bread, a slice of which has been slathered with you know what, then it is really "cool," especially if eaten while leaning up against a wheat shock listening to the meadow music.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.