I've always kinda liked October, but it made me cranky this year. I noticed there weren't very many of those fluffy white clouds, the ones I remember from when I was a child; the ones that use to drift lazily in the most beautiful deep blue sky you ever did see-every day. They did--didn't they?
Also, where were the zillions of rackety crickets and katydids and "hoppers" that would leap ahead of me in noisy throngs from one fragrant yellowing weed clump to another as I kicked at silly-acting tumblebugs along the country road, on my way home from school?
Where was that huge shimmering harvest moon, with the face you could plainly see, grinning down at you? (No hazy mist over it.) That always made everything seems spookier as I trotted past the corn shocks in the field back of the barn while doing late chores. The kerosene lantern, winking in the distance, in the cow barn didn't help much.
Scary monsters lived in those shocks at night. I could hear their rustlings as they fought to free themselves from the tightly bound stalks. Dad said it was just rabbits hiding in there, but they sounded bigger than that to me. When the owls started hooting to one another from the big elms in the corral next to the barn my skin screeched into little bunches and I was headed for the house, dad hollering after me, and laughing (rather diabolically I imagined).
It was October. Even with all the things that would go bump in the night it was a wonderful time of the year, the last hurrah before winter pulled the covers over the landscape for the long sleep. I'm not ready, yet, this year. I want more Indian summer. Two or three days were not enough. If you missed the ones we had, that was last week. I told you they were coming. There might be a few more (in November?).
On one of those "summer" days last week I spent a marvelous time in Main Amana with a group of "adult" ladies in red hats and purple clothing. Thank our lucky stars we haven't gotten old yet. We ate lunch at the Ox Yoke Inn, shared greetings, quips, and barbs, and are, as a result, managing to remain young (er) at heart a while longer. Our leading objective was to meet with a former member of the Wellman Red Hat Ladies' "Society", Maxine Butterbaugh, who moved to Marshalltown last summer. It was an excellent excuse to be our "inner selves" in an outward way. Some of us even helped out the colonies by buying some of their grandiose wares. My car, which only held two, slid to a brief stop at the small, but mightily aromatic, Millstream Brewing Company for a six-pack of beer--that's root beer, folks. It's home brewed in the Amanas; you can get it locally--right here in "river city," but it just tastes a lot better, of course, when you can go to the source. Note: They have other kinds of beer, too; all Amana brewed. You'll notice that right off when you open their front door. Whoooff!
On the way back to our home turf my car passed once again through Oxford and-- wouldn't you know it-my luck--we had to stop just south of there because of a major accident on the I-80 overpass. NO, I DIDN'T GET PICTURES-Be quiet! There was debris spread all over the area, above and down where we had to travel.
A large transport truck had slammed into several concrete barriers, scattering construction equipment and injuring workers.
We learned later that of the injured, one was reportedly from Iowa County, from Parnell. The trucker, also injured, was from out of state.
PS: NO! I didn't have anything to do with that bank robbery at Oxford the following day. Nice car he swiped for the getaway. Good touch. I wasn't there.