Lupines

Today's post has been a staple on this blog for many years. A number of years ago I read A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. I think it was a leftover from John's college days. I would highly recommend it to any lover of nature and wild things. One of the readers of this blog is a long time biologist for the state of Vermont. She once confessed that she had seriously considered naming her son Aldo as  Mr. Leopold had greatly affected the arc of her own life. Yikes, that was a close one eh Cory?

In short, the Sand Counties are poor.

Yet in the 1930's, when the alphabetical uplifts galloped like forty horsemen across the Big Flats, exhorting the sand farmers to resettle elsewhere, these benighted folk did not want to go, even when baited with 3 percent at the federal land bank. I began to wonder why, and finally, to settle the question, I bought myself a sand farm.

Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels. If they did, the weed-control officer, who seldom sees a dewy dawn, would doubtless insist that they be cut. Do economists know about lupines?