Land

I drove us out into the wheat fields, the crop thick and undulant. The sky was high and clear blue. The hot wind gusting and dusty and dotted with snapping grasshoppers. Hawks patrolled, lazing in the great warm dome or sitting sentry in a single tree here and there. I didn't say so but I drove us, to the extent memory could lead me, near to the place we buried the Americans. It's odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning – though that's lucky since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable whereas they're otherwise neither. Instead it all becomes part of our complex mind, to which, if we're lucky, we can finally assent. The great fields of grain swayed and hissed and shifted colors and bent and lay back against the wind where we stopped our car. 

-- from Canada by Richard Ford