Taking Stock

I'm looking back on my sojourn in the SouthWest and trying to figure out what I take away from it.  I really can't quite explain how different it is.  The space, the colors, the horizons, the shapes of the land itself, the fact that rain and even hail actually dries before it ever hits the ground, the art, the peoples and the history.  Believe me, this is not like the difference between say Savannah and New York.  Maybe the best way to tell it is to say that it is so different that when I would get into a conversation with someone local, there would be a nano second when I would be surprised that we were speaking the same language.  It feels so much like another country.  A beautiful and friendly one, but another world.

I'm in Kansas right now (of course, Dorothy had to return to Kansas) and today my taking stock went a bit farther into this question of variety.  I had stopped at The Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in Strong City, KS.  A couple had been in the Visitor Center and as they headed out to the parking area, I saw them take a look at my car with its New York plates.  I followed them out, got into my car and started to study the map of hiking trails.  Then I looked up to see the gentleman who had noticed my car standing at my window.  He said he had always wondered how someone from New York would feel about the prairie and the flint hills that surrounded us.  I told him that one word that came to mind was "stunned".  I told him how impressed I was and how much I loved a simple thing like the immense horizon, the sheer size of it and how far it was away.  I explained that I loved NYC and its theatres and art and the harbor and the ocean.  I told him about the fact that it was so different that it seemed like another country, as though something this far away and this different couldn't possibly be part of the same place.  "I see, " he said, " but then I guess that's what makes us us.  We can be so different and still it's all us."  From the heartland, straight to my heart.