Kansas

My father grew up on a farm in Troy, Kansas. He joined the Navy, saw California, and decided that was the place for him. I grew up in southern California. In addition to the many family road trips to Kansas to visit my grandparents and aunt & uncle, my brother, sister and I spent several summers on the two farms, gathering eggs, milking cows, feeding sheep, and hollerin' for pigs ("Suuuu-eeee, suey-suey"). My aunt still lives in Troy, a small town right out of Middle America, with a water tower to announce its presence.

My aunt no longer lives on the farm we visited as children.
A few years ago she moved into the home
(on the outskirts of town)
in which my uncle grew up.

Pretty, isn't it?

In the old days, if you wanted water,you had to pump a handle.
I remember doing just that!

This is the view off my aunt's back porch.

That's a soy bean crop just waiting for harvest.Doniphan County has its own water tower.
I liked this photo because the top of the tower looks
higher than the clouds.

It's fall and the harvest has started. The main crop around Troy is corn, which will be used to produce corn products (like Fritos), feed for livestock, and bio-fuel. I walked into this corn field and thought,

"If you build it, they will come."

This year has produced a bumper crop and farmers will be putting in long hours of harvesting right up to Thanksgiving. The harvesting is done on a combine, a HUGE machine that cuts the stalks, plucks the cobs, shucks the husks, and isolates the kernels,

which are then transferred to a HUGE trailer
pulled behind a HUGE tractor.

From the trailer, the corn is transferred to a container on a semi-truck, driven to storage bins, and using a conveyor like escalator, dumped in. Farming is BIG business. Did I mention that everything is HUGE? Last year I climbed about one third of the way up this tower. I'd like to get all the way to the top. Maybe next year. Most of my childhood days in Kansas were in the summer when it is hot and humid. (I am so glad my father found California.) But the weather on this trip, just at the start of fall, was perfect. I saw skies like this every day.