Karolinka In & Around Bulgaria

Wheat and a barn

There’s a verse from the patriotic song: America the Beautiful that goes like this “O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain!” I learned the song when I was little and I was pretty convinced that the song must be written about where I’d grown up–the Pacific Northwest.

Oh and the world revolved around me!

Now that I am an adult and I’ve seen more of the country (and we have wikipedia), I suspect that I wasn’t 100% correct in my previous assumption. I’d guess that the purple mountains are probably the Rocky mountains in Colorado. That the spacious skies referred to are those of the American southwest.   That the fruited plain covers Ohio, Indiana and Illinois (thanks Johnny Appleseed). And the amber waves of grain? Well these are probably huge swaths of wheat covering the west and midwest.

Fields of golden wheat

So while the whole verse is pretty clearly not about my home maybe I wasn’t too far off because we too have waves of grain. Wheat that in the summer right before harvest is amber in color and blows in the wind creating a rippling effect that evokes the waves of an ocean.

Fields of Walla Walla Wheat

Walla Walla is surrounded by fields of rolling wheat.

The days here are long, dry and very hot and the nights cool down. Perfect for growing wheat. It also turns out that this weather (and our soil) is also pretty perfect for growing red wine grapes as well. Oh and lavender. Lavender is a new-ish addition to the valley and loves it here.

Blade of Wheat

I went out with my dAd at dusk to try to catch the wheat fields in their full glory–as these pictures demonstrate. (You may remember that I also went out with my dAd in December/January to take pictures in the snow.)

What can’t be captured is the smell of ripening wheat. I’ve grown so used it that it wasn’t until I was actually standing in it that I really noticed it. It smells like the best combination of fresh dirt and home-baked bread.

The other really wonderful thing about finding yourself in a wheat field at dusk are deer. Deer eat twice a day. At dawn and at dusk. This is because they are clever. During the day they hide in trees and bushes so they are very hard to see but at dusk deer come out to eat. They like to eat everything.

Curved Wheat

On our drive, we saw lots of deer out and about. We spotted moms and babies. We saw young teenage-boy deer with newly growing antlers. We glimpsed a few deer that were too far away to see much more than their outlines in fields. But the most impressive deer was the one we saw but were unable to take pictures of.

Artsy-fartsy wheat photo

My dAd and I were taking “artsy-fartsy” pictures of wheat. The close-ups if you’re interested. My dAd says: Carolyn. And I look up just in time to see a very big male deer with beautiful antlers starting at us about a city block from us. He was velvety brown in high contrast to the golden wheat. As soon as we made eye contact he bounded silently away through the field and before we knew it he was a speck in the horizon.

The deer running away

My dAd taking photos