this is your annual reminder

i know i see this plant every year, and i’m pretty sure i look it up most years, and yet right now it is everywhere, from roadsides to prairies to medians to ditches, and i just had to look it up again, like that third cousin’s husband at the family reunion where, every year,  you have to put your mouth near your husband’s ear and stage whisper, “don’t look now, but what’s the name of that guy in the cargo shorts and the bad goatee, the one who’s married to margo?”

foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum)