Prairie Remembrance

“The prairie skies can always make you see more than what you believe.”

                                                                                              - Jackson Burnett, The Past Never Ends      

“Samuel finally understood the sound of the wind after all these years: The winds were a chorus of the prairie’s ever-present heartaches.”  

                                                                                      - Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run

My place is not of this place. I travelled back to what was once ‘home’ this past weekend. To the prairie, of which I am still a part of, or of what is still a part of me. I peered out of the window of the airplane onto the counterpane of squares and shapes that delineated crops and pastures, coulees and slow, meandering river. I puzzled about whether I missed the prairies, I speculated on whether the wind could still mess with my head.

I felt that I, indeed, missed the coulees. The fatigue, the languor of the vast plate of prairie alleviated by the snug contours, the lineament, the idiosyncrasy of the folded, pleated coulees – I have missed them.

I felt that I have missed the sky. The sky that, especially on clear, star-gorged nights, felt like, from horizon to horizon, a star-painted dish had been upturned over my world and there is nothing but stars from my left to my right hand – arching over my head and pooling at my feet. Those skies have been unrecalled. I have missed them.

Or, sweeping across blue skies, pure and cerulean, the wisps of clouds known as mares-tails.  Clouds like a veil, a nebulosity, ol’ buttermilk sky. Skudding across the sky in the endless, mindless wind that makes me feel like curtains are constantly billowing in my head, doors slamming and clattering in my mind.

Yet still, a dawdling, ambagious river counters the precipitate wind. If one can follow the curves and whorls of the river, then the wind that buffets the body and addles the mind can be tamed. I have missed lazy rivers, disinclined to be boisterous.

This place, the prairies, is no longer my place – at least not for the time between. But the absence of it still evokes a bereavement, a sorrow – a melancholy. And though I have come to feel the insistence of a my current place, my 'home', I miss the countenance of the prairie, the tempest that swirls my  introspection.