The sunflowers are a little sparser this year, but no less delectable.  Birds blast out of the golden stubble of last year’s crop, staking their claims to the coming flush of seeds, which the bees labor and bumble upon – tirelessly, painstakingly dragging pollen from one tiny pistil to another across the center of each glowing orb.

The sky is big, and the birds seem somehow freer here, as if abandoning the wary self-consciousness that burdens them in parking lots and city lawns.  This place has belonged to them always, leased from their ancestors, season after season by humans who scraped and turned the earth under the blue, and brought to the surface a feast of seeds and insects as payment in kind.