Maize Maze or a Corn Maze!
Author :
Sruts
Blog :Somewhere I Belong... the path to finding me
Date: 10/27/2011 12:12:55 AM
The heat and the cold, the wind and the rain… if you’ve lived in Chicago, you know what I’m talking about. The bipolar weather that you actually tend to appreciate at times, complain about at most, and just resign to always. 
Every resident of every city does it!
Fall (autumn, till I came to the US), spring and winter are my favorite seasons. Because everything changes! Summer is fun – but I’m not a beach person. I’d rather sit indoors than out in the sweltering heat. Fall and spring are my ‘go outside and enjoy’ seasons. Winter is my ‘appreciate the warmth but admire the beauty of the cold’, and there is beauty to beheld in winter! But I’ll wait to go on about that when it actually does arrive. For now I’ll stick with the marvelousness of Fall.
When I went back home for a weekend two weeks ago, everything was still green. I returned, two days later, and everything was changing. Light greens, bright oranges, mellow yellows, rich maroons, brittle browns… I saw these and much more on the train ride from the airport to the Loop. I was fascinated! True, the weather was darkish and dreary, cold and windy with the pelting rain, the lake, turning a muddy brown as the winds whipped up the waves. But there was that strength to it, a force that man can’t reckon with at play. I loved it! It gets rather deceptive too, giving the appearance of a bright and calm day, until the moment you step outside to the whistling wind, blowing in from the lake, sweeping this way and that!
Then a glimpse of a ‘warmer’ day before plunging down the scale into the cold foreboding realms over the bridge of fall and winter. That’s how we welcomed fall this year in the city. As depressing as it sounds, I still managed to have fun! With the cold and the rain and the wind and the anticipation of a dreadful winter!
I didn’t do the ‘fall colors’ drive this year, but we managed to make it out to Richardson Farm, where a 33 acre corn field had been cut out to make a maze! They have a different maze every year, and this time it was a ‘salute to the troops’. 4 mazes, we skipped the ‘quiz maze’, each of us navigating through the maze of our choice, 6 check points in each maze, tall crops of corn, talking, joking… We kept to true the instruction at the entrance of the maze – Get Lost Here! We walked around for over 2 hours, so I’m guessing about 6 or 7 miles, on farmland. The sky was blue and the country side smelled crisp. Literally. The air was so soothing and clean, I felt my lungs sigh with uncontrolled pleasure!
We received, at the end of our walk, a certificate that gave us the credentials of having walked through the world’d largest corn maze.
Instead of sinking in and having corn bread and funnel cake for lunch, we drove to a Burger King close by, devoured burgers, walked down to the Dairy Queen across the street and indulged in heavenly chocolate variant blizzards. The delight of knowing your stomach is satisfied is the sign to take a nap. Which we didn’t do. Instead, we talked, comfortable in our camaraderie, relieving our minds and weighing our emotions. It was delightful! Because we did have an ‘a-maze-ing’ time!!
Filed under: Espresso - Black Cream and Sugar Tagged: corn maze, fall, richardson farm 
