"Sunny Days"

On this hot June afternoon, we decided to take a little roadtrip to the "cone-try" to check out the Sunflower Trail in Gilliam. So, Me-Me, JuJu, DeeDee, Mommy and you kiddos loaded up two Honda Accords and headed north. We had lunch at a little cafe in "downtown" Gilliam that had less than wonderful service. We were expecting some good-old down home friendliness and got none of that. After we got a few pictures across the street from the cafe, we went exploring down the Sunflower Trail and had to stop and steal some corn. There were fields and fields, and I thought it would be neat to show y'all corn growing on the stalk. We plucked a few ears keeping a careful watch for angry farmers. Mommy didn't plan very well (and JuJu let me know it) and we were "running on fumes" for gasoline. Some nice locals let us know that a gas station was just a few miles up the way, but a huge sunflower field was very close by. So we took a chance and detoured to it, praying we wouldn't run out of gas. When we got to the field, it was well worth the risk. It was sunflowers as far as the eye could see. There was a sign that instructed us to pick all we wanted. And we did. Well, we cut as many as we could shove in our plastic pitcher and still carry it. Those things are heavy! Landon, you were in awe of how big the leaves were. There were also a lot of stink bugs that you were pretty interested in too. Once in the car, you said, "I think a stink bug stinked me," after you smelled your hands. When we got home we made several short-lived glorious bouquets of our harvest, as they don't do well as cut flowers.

Several days later, we shucked our "hot" corn, which turned out to be field corn (like you feed pigs), but we sauteed it up and slathered it in butter, and it wasn't half bad.