"The thing about cooking for college guys, of course, is that if it’s food, on the table and they didn’t have to make it, it was fantastic."

"When I still worked the family farm 65 or 70 years ago, we didn’t grow sunflowers, not intentionally, anyway. With no help from us, the pesky things grew along the edges of our corn."

"When our youngest child left for college, I was prepared for the house to be a little quiet. I wasn’t prepared for the silence to fall over the house like a thick quilt."

"It’s tough for a guy to fire his son and then go home and tell his spouse he just canned her baby boy."

Although I grew up on a farm eight miles from the nearest town, I never experienced the wonders of attending a country school.

"Few experiences match sitting on the seat of a deep-throated John Deere 720 diesel and glancing back every few seconds to admire the way the freshly cut soil was sliding up the shiny plow shares and tumbling over onto the cut from the previous trip around the field."

"They thought I was the luckiest kid alive. I could have charged admission."

Writing about prairie fires a couple of weeks ago got me to thinking just how precious water was to farmers on the plains. Even as a kid, I kn…