While we were looking at this old photo, Mom told me that during the picture-taking, a meadowlark’s song rippled from a nearby fencepost. Danny remarked that the meadowlark was his favorite bird.
Meadowlarks are mentioned a few times throughout Leora’s Letters, but that bittersweet comment embedded a common early spring countryside bird into the family story.
Junior, Foster Field, Spring 1945: He supposed the corn planters were clicking all over the land by then. He bet that Iowa was really pretty. There were meadowlarks on Matagorda but Junior said they didn’t sing right, they “had just one song.” Iowa’s meadowlarks “have at least two songs and they really sound off!!”
Remarkably similar to the Western Meadowlark in colors and pattern, the Eastern Meadowlark has a very different song.
When I asked Nicholas Dowd if he’d contribute a poem for the book, he located the perfect one he’d written decades earlier in college. It’s called “Meadowlark.” Nick grew up in Guthrie Center while Leora Wilson lived there. She knew his father and grandfather!
Its song is at once hopeful and haunting.
