Hay North of Town

Personally I prefer the smaller square hay bales for feeding horses – they’re easier to manage – but the big round ones are much more picturesque.  I took this photo while passing this field at about 40 mph.  Don't worry, my mom was driving, not me.

My Favorite Landscape

This is the view from my parents’ house.  The grain elevator is found on maps as Hutchins, Kansas.  It’s not a town.  It’s just an old grain elevator 2 ½ miles south of Scott City. As best as I can figure, it got listed as a town because it was a grain elevator and a stop on the railroad, and because most grain elevators and railroad stops are in towns so somebody along the way decided it must be a town. At the time it was built – 1947 – it was the only privately owned elevator in Kansas. Clarence Thomas Hutchins built the elevator, hence the name. Fortunately only the Hutchins stuck, because no one called him Clarence. Sometimes he went by C.T., but to most he was known as Pete Hutchins (how he came by the name Pete is a story I’ll tell another time). To me, his oldest great-granddaughter, he was Grandpa Pete, and he was my hero.

County Line

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West.”  From In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. 

This photo was taken about 25 miles from Holcomb at the East Place on my dad's family farm.  My parents lived at the East Place just after they were married and until I was a year old. 

Church of the Brethren

Prairie View Church of the Brethren is a tiny church out in the country, 15 miles from the nearest town.  My great-grandfather Crist preached in the church.  Probably at least a third of the graves in the small cemetery behind the church mark the final resting places of my relatives, including my great-grandparents, my grandfather and several great-aunts and great-uncles (and I had a lot – my great-grandfather had 17 children). 

The white structure in the distance is the barn at the West Place, which is where I lived in from the time I was a year old until I was about 5 years old.  The West Place was part of my dad's family farm and where he spent summers as a child.

Friend
 

Friend, Kansas is a tiny unincorporated town just about 4 miles from the West Place.  When I was a kid there was a small post office and general store there.  Some of my earliest memories are of going with my dad to pick up the mail from Mrs. Miller, who owned the general store and ran the post office.  Sometimes my dad would buy me a purple cow…the candy, not the animal.  I don't think they make purple cows anymore, but they were grape-flavored versions of brown cows.  Part of the appeal for me was that my favorite poem was about a purple cow:

I never saw a purple cow;
I never hope to see one;
but I can tell you anyhow;
I'd rather see than be one.

(Written by Gelett Burgess in 1895)

I recited that poem often as a child.  I'm sure Mrs. Miller got to hear it more than once.