Summer on the prairies is a continual feast of beauty.
c.e.hollis
July finds us half way through our summer season in Oklahoma.
The prairies are roaring with life. Grasses are shoulder high and in them bees buzz and bumble from flower to flower. There are birds in the mix and butterflies everywhere. Wasps, cicadas, and walking sticks, preying mantis, grasshoppers and leafhoppers fill the windswept stems and grasses with life. Gnats fly in their little swarms. Dragonflies and mayflies add to the business going on. Flies, beetles, honey bees, and work the flowers. The noise is immense––like city traffic yet with no vehicles, voices, sirens, or horns. Maybe a tractor humming along to the same song cutting hay somewhere.
Cows and horses graze the pasture lands and hawks circle overhead. A crow caws his unloveable sound and flies from tree top to treetop. A meadowlark perches on a barbed wire fence and sings for the sheer joy of life. The scissortailed flycatchers balance on the telephone wires and mockingbirds investigate the honeysuckle vines.
Bright butterflies––Satyrs, Tortoiseshells, Hairstreaks,Sulphurs, Monarchs, Admirals, swallowtails, and spotted buckeyes work the meadows. Sunflowers move with the sun and follow the light.
Fences sag under the wight of wild roses, Queen Ann’s Lace, honeysuckle and trumpet vines. All sorts of plants fill every spot so a person like me could never ever learn all the names of them. There are short plants with pink flowers, yellow flowers, and white and purple blooms down in amongst all the other taller plants. There are cone flowers–– white pink and yellow.
Creeks meander through. Roadways and fences make the other divisons. Pastures, orchards, towns, and meadows sprawl across the prairie lands and life is home there and thriving.
A person just passing by has no idea the amazing numbers of plants, flowers, types of grasses, insects, bugs, spiders, snakes, turtles, frogs and other little animals that live in a piece of prarie. He might, yes, notice a deer, a bison, a bull or a horse, but he might miss the rabbits, the mice, the caterpillars, the armadillos, coyotes, possoms, foxes and cats, the critters, the prairie hens, the sparrows, the egrets, the ducks, the wild hogs, raccoons, skunks, the quail, the owls, and pheasants––the innumerable living things that roam, creep, crawl, fly, bustle, hide, climb, nest, and burrow there.
Like a segment of ocean the prairie is teeming, full to overflowing with life!
What’s Good About Home! 
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