Auntie Em It's a Sand Storm

We were almost out of Kansas as the sun was beginning to set. There was a heavy cloud layer that looked like a storm. I was thinking about how the Wizard of Oz started out in Kansas and I was picturing the tornado that could easily come through the empty grassland we were driving through, when all of a sudden an entirely different sort of storm kicked up.

A sand storm started to roll across the highway in front of us. It was intense, post-apocalyptic and really beautiful.

Wild Apples in Kansas

The drive across Kansas was long. We listened to Huckleberry Finn most of the way. The whole family was sick and grumpy. The one interesting thing of note is that the whole way across Kansas I kept seeing apple trees poking out of clusters of wild unkempt tree stands along the road.

The little yellow spots on the tree in the middle left are apples!

At first I thought maybe they were the result of Johnny Apple Seed, but I looked it up and found a historical record that said specifically that they were not. They had been planted by the pioneers coming to settle Kansas.

I kept doing a double take. It was so hard to believe they could just be apples all over the place in random unclaimed spots that I kept trying to convince myself I was wrong and they were something else. The tree in the middle is definitely an apple tree with huge golden apples on it.

They used them as wind blocks, and had the added benefit of producing fruit. It was so odd to see golden delicious apples, huge and ripe, poking out of the brush and random wild trees along the highway, completely unclaimed and unharvested.