I have never felt that particular brand of civic pride that makes people tattoo city skylines on their arms or fiercely defend local sports teams. Ask me where I’m from, and I’ll happily tell you, but the name of the town or the boundaries on a municipal map don’t quite capture the truth of it. My allegiance isn't to a postal code, a telephone number, a downtown core, or a grid of suburban streets. Instead, my sense of self are tangled in something much older and much wider: the land itself.
At my core, I am a prairie girl. A specific kind of quiet lives in the open country, a silence that doesn't feel empty but rather full and heavy with possibility and breathing. People who didn't grow up here often look at the landscape and see nothing: just miles of flatness stretching out toward a distant horizon where the earth meets the sky in a seamless, unbroken line. But what looks like emptiness to an outsider is, to me, actually an abundance of space, a place where the air feels lighter and my lungs remember how to expand properly. There is, after all, so much air to breathe!
I’ve met the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and stared up at towering mountain ranges, recognising their majesty without ever feeling a flicker of belonging. Mountains feel disordered to me, casting long shadows that box the world in and cut off the view, leaving me closed in and restless. The ocean, with its endless churning rhythm and unpredictable depths, is overwhelming, a force demanding constant vigilance. They are magnificent landscapes, to be sure, but they belong to someone else’s story, not mine.
Give me the big, wide, flat expanses every single time. Out here, the sky is the main event, occupying two-thirds of your vision and shifting through a masterclass of weather over the course of a single afternoon. You can watch a thunderstorm form thirty miles away, tracking the dark, bruised bellies of the clouds as they roll over the plains, trailing veils of silver rain. The light hits the earth differently here, unobstructed and raw, painting the fields in tones of gold, amber, and deep burnt orange as the sun dips low.
Then there are the textures of the earth swaying in the breeze. Tall grasses whisper in constant, low motion, rippling in the wind like the surface of a green-and-bronze sea. And amidst that sea, finding a shock of brilliant red prairie poppies or singing blue cornflowers or black-eyed susans or waving wild wheat thriving against the odds in the dry, stubborn soil always feels like a quiet rebellion. They are resilient, delicate yet tough, blooming fiercely in spaces that demand endurance.
This connection isn’t born of mere nostalgia; it’s a cellular recognition. When I am surrounded by this landscape, everything in my nervous system settles into place, whispering that this is where I make sense. It’s a deep-seated knowing that doesn't require a monument or a city's history to validate it. The horizontal pull of the land grounds me in a way vertical things never could. You can take the girl away from the plains - and so often, it seems, life does exactly that - but that horizon stays etched behind your eyelids, a permanent internal compass. My loyalty is to the clay, the wind. It’s a quiet belonging, rooted not in human lines on a map, but in the vast, breathing expanse of the grass and the light from an endless sweep of sky.