Resilience: Prompt Post No. 1

Grass swells and sandy hollows, the topography of Hay Springs, Nebraska.
A patterned expression of single mindedness, rows and rows
wheat corn beans sugarbeet potato
chase each other to the horizon.
Here the land is as thirsty for moisture
as the people are for excitement
gossip
firewater
Busch Budweiser Calvert
and an escape from the nothingness,
the never-ending
forever found in the fields.

Full of secrets, this land requires
a keen eye, a sharp mind
and the ability to look and listen,
a desire to learn.
This landscape yields nothing easily,
but in town
the voices whisper behind your back
like sandstorms,
so loud you know what you've said
before you even speak.

Fifty mile-an-hour winds today;
How easily the rich dirt leaves us.
Sometimes I think it should take me too,
up and blow me away.
I hate the wind when it blows like this,
galling rasping breaking
and wearing us down.
Funny
that I should love the weariness of travel,
the dirt-packed roads,
the ache for place the dwells in my soul.

Diagrammed and tangible, like memories at the quilt show,
here the seasons carry on around us.
A cold spell,
brittle and unforgiving
sits like iron atop the county;
underneath we are rusted and cold.
The only people who move now are the ranchers
or the hunters.
There's talk of spring
some years,

a figure of speech we'd like to welcome,
but she reveals a downy swell
curves a gentle finger,
then teases
and is gone.
Black ice invisibility gives way
to paintbrush summers
heat waves
mirages on the road
and a forgetting of the cold.
Then harvest.
Of course there's that one,
a season that stands alone.

Smack in the center of middle America
the melting pot placed here is cold.
homogenized, related, similar
--If you are from here, then you know.
But outsiders, passers-by, the unusual or unfamiliar
--best be just a passin' on down the road.
Stick around and stay a while,
but don't forget your place
must be established slowly
roots riverbeds and cowtrails
among the people that I know.

***

After college, each time I came home for a visit I laid low on the farm, avoided town (unless it was a holiday equalling something exciting) and all public places. I didn't really want people to know I was home, for however short a period it might be. What do you tell people when they ask you how D.C. is, or Chicago? Most of the people I grew up with were born here, stayed here for college, and will be buried along with their relatives in the cemetery outside town. Most of them are of farming/ranching stock, and it is this profession they entered after high school.

Well, things have shaped up differently this time around. I poked my nose out from under my rock by going to basketball games and junior class prom fundraiser dinners my second weekend back, and since then, I've managed to see people from town about once a week. I'm finding it amazingly easy to fall back into the swing of life here--this is both comforting and sad. Nothing ever changes, not really, and when I first thought about how to answer this prompt, I wasn't sure how I'd write about this feeling (what I see as stagnation, others might call a beautiful pattern), so I'm pretty happy with the neutrality of my writing.

I appreciate the ease of life my friends experience (searching for this is after all, part of what prompted me to leave Chicago), and for those who truly have grown into themselves, I am happy. But for my friends and community members who are battered by farm debt, mistrust and insecurities, I feel a deeply reaching hairline of sorrow.

And yet, even though there is no novelty here, for me, I see the ways the land and the weather and the living of life is a challenge, and maybe that's the only kind of challenge some people really want or need. In coming home, maybe I'm beginning to finally understand that; what worries me is that with comfort, comes comes the disinterest in any other kind of challenge.