21 September

Just past Ferguson's Apple Orchard down at the end of Tamarack Road, the old Aermotor windmill barely jostled against a thin late-September wind.  Here and there along the old gravel road crickets chirped hidden in the torn hay and shorn cornstalks. If you chose, you could reach over from the seat of your bike and pick a cob like you would any ripe fruit off a limb.  The sky blue as a potion.

Old mills are mesmerizing – the fact that they're still standing, those rusted tin legs so slender you'd think some historical windstorm would have pried their feet out of the earth by now.  All that metal reaching upwards in the sky an antique gesture of some other generation's invested hope in technology.  Dirt roads that meander off

into vaulted bluffs hold old farm components that lay strung out over wild lawns not so much as sad metal but simply unused...at rest.  Yet the windmill still stands ready for use.

Rising up from all this are the apple orchards where we still flock in early fall to sample the apples' earthy sweetness,

 

and the children – even if they don't know it – compare this year's growth to the dangling sunflowers.