Striking up summer’s chorus

For a couple of days hundreds of Painted Lady butterflies were hanging out on the concrete directly in front of my garage doors. A few weeks ago I swept the past winter out of my garage, which means that in addition to dirt there was a lot of salt that my tires picked up from frozen highways.

Butterflies, like humans, need salt in their little systems and this was a good source for them. “Painted Lady” is such an evocative phrase. I picture beautiful long-legged women dancing at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, faces made up, lips bright red. The butterflies have moved on but for a few days I enjoyed their company and loved it when they alighted on my arms each time I walked past their little party.

Walnuts have been falling, rather unusual for this time of year. The thing is that the walnuts look normal, except that each is the size of a marble. I don’t know the science of it but I have to assume that our prolonged drought was the root cause. Hopefully some rain will help.

A few miles from here a farmer has lined up a half-dozen or so portable grain augers along a fence line and at dusk, if you squint just a little it’s easy to imagine that we have somehow traveled back to the Jurassic Period and that the augers are, in fact, a lineup of dinosaurs called Brontosaurus.

A fifty-foot Northern Catalpa tree in the hollow is again sporting fabulous white flowers and, oddly, it makes me think of The Music Man. Years ago I was in Mason City, Iowa, and noticed that in the front yard of Meredith Willson’s boyhood home was a seventy-foot catalpa tree, one that would do a lot of damage if it fell toward the house. And, for the record, when I was 10 years old I fell in love with Shirley Jones, AKA Marian the librarian.

Speaking of bright, beautiful women, a week or so ago I had lunch with three women from my high school class, women who traveled here from Madison, Boston, and Chicago. After only a few minutes together they looked just as they did in high school, women who would have sweetly and politely said no thanks if I had asked for a date. And they would have been right, as I didn’t have much to offer back then, neither handsome nor a good student, and I was surly most of the time. And now, a lifetime later, and at a time when I need it most, old acquaintances have become new friends, new friends who gathered, talked, and laughed with me for four hours. It was magic.

The rains have finally arrived and soon I’ll be spending more hours on my tractor with a cutter behind it. There will be a Kansas University ball cap (KU) saving my facing from sunburn, and a bandanna circling my old crepey neck. For decades I have enjoyed my tractor time, as it allows me to sing in full voice, not concerned about anyone hearing an old man belt out pop tunes from the 1970s. I don’t know that real farmers sing whilst tractor driving but I hope they do.

I hope they sing songs from The Music Man, like “The Wells Fargo Wagon,” “Iowa Stubborn,” or, my favorite, “Till There Was You,” because when we all sing we lighten the earth, we project a bit of hope, and we emerge just a little bit better, a tiny bit happier than we were just before the tractor’s diesel engine belched black smoke in to the air, just before the glorious chorus begins.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. His book “The Iowa State Fair” is available from the University of Iowa Press.