Home

Pretty much my whole adolescence I fantasized about picking up and moving to New York City. I'm far too much of a coward to ever actually do this, and, having actually been to NYC, I know that all of the things I thought I would love about it would slowly drive me bat shit insane.

Also, I like Kansas... it took me a long time to learn how to like it.  I know I'm not ever supposed to admit that... I'm supposed to despise Kansas, at least, that is what decades of movies and television shows have taught us, right? That Kansas is a place you reject and flee as soon as you can, because once you get out of that god forsaken, nowhere place full of bigots and religious assholes your real life can begin. But I don't feel that way.

I love the wide, open spaces. I love that you can drive 30 minutes and be someplace that doesn't look all that different from what it might have looked like 150 years ago when pioneers found their way here.  I love that it isn't "pretty" in that obvious way some places are.  I don't know what it's like to live a place where the beauty, natural or man made, just smacks you in the face. I like the emptiness. A place where the sky is so big you can see what the weather will be in 5 hours.

I can stare at the ocean and mostly feel nothing except that it is really, really incomprehensibly big, but put me in the middle of a wheat field in early June and ask me what I feel... I would struggle to explain it to you.

Image from Google.

"And the waves gave place to the wheatlands 

      Myriad-touched 'with gold --  

Then my soul felt century-weary 

      And untold aeons old;"

- From A Wheat-Field Fantasy by Harry Kemp