August 5-8: Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesty, above the fruited plain... August in the foothills of the Wallowas is the realization of the song we learned in a tiny, crowded eastern seaboard town, where we had only the encouragement of our enthusiastic music teacher Miss O'Brien to try to imagine such a place. Fat cattle and sleek horses, huge tracts of buff-colored wheat ready for harvest, fields of corn and some potatoes, and what is that short dark green stuff? Acres and acres of it east of LaGrande. We couldn't identify it, I fought the urge to stop the van and pick a leaf...but the mystery was solved later that morning when we got to Wallowa and stopped at the Blonde Strawberry Cafe. It's MINT!! Acres
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