Green seas.

The day passed in a steadiness of breeze, a constancy of windrush and glittered light behind the full greens of midyear. I continue to learn how to use my space: in the late afternoon, the desk is alight and a-flicker, the shadows of my ink bottles cast huge from the windowsill by a slow sun. In the evening, I went in search of food and photographs. My pictures have fallen away since just before the move, though I keep finding space and time for most of the other things I need to do. But tonight, I wanted pictures of our corn, that curly speary green. It's long enough now to ripple and wave like water: that's what I went out to find, that more than the milk and cheese and good bread I needed from the store.

And it's hard to find the views I need when I'm behind the wheel of the car, and it seems well-nigh impossible to find them without getting behind the wheel of the car. I'm approaching the day when I shorten the camera bag's strap and hop on my bicycle, in the hopes of being able to get farther into the county than I can manage on foot.

"This is how you know I'm from Indiana," I said to two students last week on the way to dinner. "I'm this excited about the corn." To eat it, yes, and as simply as possible. And, oh, to see it, to gaze at its stretch and sweep. To find half my roads now at the bottoms of green canyons. I will not see the end of this year's crop; the stalks will still be standing in the fields when I fly away. And I will not see the beginning of next year's crop, in its different fields, the fields where beans grow a thicker green this year, or where only scraps and weeds interrupt a fallowing.

Right now, most pleasures have that sudden edge of homesickness. I surfeit: this is my first packing.