Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together.

Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.

There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.