Landscapes

Have you noticed this? If you have a blog idea cooking in your mind, and you don’t post it soon enough, it will go away. They are like cats, you have to pay attention to them or they sulk and brood out of your reach. I had a couple of thoughts I wanted to write about a few days ago, but they’re mostly gone now.

One. The Desmoines airport is actually breezy and pleasant, instead of drab and weary. Strange, no? After spending way too much time at O’Hare and Reagan, I have acquired an appreciation for terminals that aren’t pulsing with furious jostling travelers trying to catch their flights.

It got me thinking of a drive back from Chicago a few years ago, when it occurred to me that those endless, stunningly flat cornfields were beautiful. In contrast to India’s bursting, lush and often cacophonous landscapes, those mid-western cornfields had seemed so hopelessly ordinary, almost aggressively common. Its beauty is not one to stand up and shout hello, instead it waits timidly and patiently for you to gaze out the window on one of those long drives, and let your mind wander along those vast fields. And quite suddenly, that tree standing alone, an unexpected break on the horizon will startle you with its splendor.