{p,h,f,r}, vol. 7

I look forward to Thursdays because we can share the little moments in our lives that would otherwise be overlooked but for the theme of {pretty, happy, funny, real} over at Like Mother, Like Daughter.

{pretty}

This is a stand of corn about a block away from our house. It really IS as high as an elephant's eye - I've never seen corn this tall before! Here's a haiku that our oldest granddaughter Jordan wrote about corn when her sister Ayla told her on the phone that she was making corn pone and Jordan thought she said "corn poem"...so Jordan was inspired to write a corn poem:
Corn grows majestic
Silky tops wave in the breeze
The sunshine beats down

It perfectly describes the corn, verdad?

{happy}

We had a cabalgata in our town last Sunday. A cabalgata is sort of a fiesta for rancheros (Mexican cattle ranchers). It starts with a whole group of rancheros riding into town on horseback, then proceeding to the stadium where they have something like a rodeo but not the physically dangerous parts. The focus is on showing off their horses (and mules) rather than competing in physically challenging events. You can see from the photo that these are real working cattlemen.

{funny}

Bananas/plantains are the oddest plants. I thought you all might be interested to see what a banana looks like when it first starts out. I hope you can see that each fruit has an orchid-shaped flower at the tip. This photo shows 2 "hands" of fruit, and there will probably be 1 to 3 more hands that emerge from that big purplish/grayish bag looking thing below them. Once they emerge it takes 6 MONTHS or more for them to be ready to pick, and they have to be picked green if you ever want them to ripen. Definitely strange (funny?)

{real}

This is the road in front of our house. That's right - it's a dirt road. Most of the roads in our town are dirt. This, of course, means that it's impossible to keep a car clean - inside or out - around here for more than one day. On the plus side, taxes are quite low here since the town doesn't have to maintain many paved roads or provide libraries (although we have one run by a nonprofit group) or pay firemen (we have a volunteer fire department). Actually, our last home in the U.S. was bordered by a dirt road (although our driveway led to a paved road on the other side of our property) so we're used to having dust all over everything.