I still find it odd that I wake up every morning in a backwater of southern Poland. It is, according to the season, vibrantly green, verdant and sunny, or grey, bare, cold and dirty. At this moment it is at its best - the landscape explodes in a million different stages of green growth. The beans are halfway up the beanpoles, which stick up from every garden. The hay has just been cut and has been piled on specially prepared sticks, making man-size haystacks standing sentry throughout the fileds like so many cousin It's. The corn is not yet knee high. Perhaps most visually arresting are the fields of red poppy flowers that contrast gorgeously with the green of the fields. Sometimes I see them singly, scattered among the green grain stalks. Other times they throughly dominate and cover a field, as though they are the crop. I have yet to understand if they are in fact the flowering stage of a cereal crop, or a particularly attractive weed that grows in with the grain. I'm sorry I don't have a picture of them.
