HUMAN INTEREST

An aging grain bin in Inman, Kan., served as Mindy Allen’s blank canvas. After six weeks, it was transformed into a mural that’s truly larger than life.

The shotgun houses and clapboard shacks are gone, but a child’s toy lingers in farmland rows. Time, tillage and rainfall reveal the sharecropper’s last testament: clusters of magnificent clay, agate and glass marbles.

Just an hour and forty-fives south of the Iowa state line, 15-year-old Garrett Heil’s cotton is a testament to the determination of a remarkable farmer not old enough to qualify for a driver’s license. Heil has succeeded in producing cotton deep in the pocket of the Midwest.