Mrs. Brown had the fine distinction of being my babysitter that day. I can see her standing in her farmhouse kitchen with her homemade dress on. Pale, flower print. Sweet lady. Soft smile. Pleasant voice.
My parents were gone for the day. My older brothers and sister were old enough to take care of themselves. I was an eight-year-old town boy in Bellevue, but we had a lot of friends with farms. She and I were the only ones there that day. Her husband was working somewhere. Pretty quiet scene. She said, "Maybe you'd like to go outside for awhile." So I did.
I climbed around on tractors and plows and forged up a mountain of stacked wood, chased a mouse around the yard and swatted a stick-machete against tall field grass
Eventually I plopped down in that bright green grass, and maybe for the first time in my life, sensed, I don't know, a holiness maybe, or the "beauty of nature", or something anyway that was very sweet and peaceful. It was the way the sun shone so bright and hot and at that angle that it only does in mid-August, and how the warm breeze whispered through the grass, tossing it around like waves on an ocean. It stopped me for a minute. Caught my attention.
Then Mrs. Brown called me in for lunch. I ran into the smell of fried, breaded yellow squash. Man, that was good. I had never had it before.
I still love fried squash, and I still wait for those bright, hot, breezy, grass-whispering days in August.