The rain began about 11 p.m. on Monday. It wasn’t a lot, just a drizzle really, but it struck a chord deep in the core of me.
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The rain began about 11 p.m. on Monday. It wasn’t a lot, just a drizzle really, but it struck a chord deep in the core of me.
Monday had been a very pretty early spring day, with big blue skies and wispy cotton batting clouds and bright, warming sunshine. It was a good day to catch up on chores and to scout grass. As I worked and hiked, all around me the prairie was wakening from her winter slumber.
Along fence lines and roadside ditches and wherever the ground had been disturbed the purplish-green of cheatgrass was beginning to stand out. Clover and kochia and the first dandelions were just beginning to show.
In the native grasslands blackroot and green needlegrass and western wheatgrass was starting to catch the eye. These grasses are a song of color played in the key of green. The tiny, triangular blades of sedge are shiny olive, the western wheatgrass green with a pronounced powdery blue tinge, and green needlegrass an exuberant emerald. As they erupt against the drab, brownish gray of last year’s growth, they take on a special vibrancy, teasing my thoughts with hints a colors just out of the range of my vision.
Shrubs and forbs were warming up for the colorful concert as well. Sumac and chokecherry buds were hard, fat kernels of condensed green, some of them already beginning to open; isolated notes of color dancing here and there in the puffs of light spring breeze.
Scattered across the calving pasture, cows and calves were seemingly everywhere. The cows were grazing almost frantically, following their noses and cropping new green grass with abandon. Calves were laying up in the warm sunshine or nursing or scampering about in cryptic calf games. A few were even nibbling on new grass, and finding, apparently, the flavor to
be delightful.