Wheat Tracks

For a long while, ocean born and bred that I am, I resisted the beauty of the prairie.

My relatives would come to visit and almost without exception they declared my adopted home ... well, a little ugly and plain. Boring and flat. In fact, we have a name for people from here: flatlanders. Which is kind of like being told your mother dresses you funny.

When you come from a place where no place is more than a half hour drive from the ocean and every second place is surrounded by hills and mountains and every other place *is* a hill or a mountain, you tend to find an absence of topography unsettling.

I can't say whether it's the years I've lived here, more here than there now, or the fact that both of my children are, in fact, flatlanders (born and bred) but the prairie has grown on me. It amazes me. Awes me. Inspires me.

Where else could you go and stand in the middle of a field and in any direction you look, all you can see is wheat and sky? There's something very humbling about that. As I told a friend the other day, "I go to the prairie when I want to remind myself."

"Of what?" he asked.

"How small I am."