On The First Part Of The Journey

It's not that I find Kansas ugly. It's not ugly at all. I find a lot of beauty there; the wide expanse of sky, the different crops and their different colors. Corn is dark and shiny. The farther east you go the more tasseled out it is. Soybeans are lower, lighter green and less glossy. Wheat is...wheat colored. I could think up some schmalzy name for the wheat color like something on Miss Clairol box, circa 1976. But I won't. It's wheat colored. And then there's the un-crop colors and textures of open range, little pastures, medians and random undesignated bits of land. These are lush and sprinkled with wildflowers where there's been rain and brown and straggly where there hasn't.

So, no, it' not ugly. It's not even boring. It's just boring to drive across on I70. If I wanted to take 5 days to get to STL instead of 1 1/2, I'd find all kinds of wonderful side roads, old cemeteries, huge cottonwood groves, quiet creeks, leaning barns, crazy billboards with Jesus holding sheaves of wheat, yarn stores, cathedrals and boyhood homes of senators, presidents and astronauts.

But I would ever do that in the summer. Or the winter. So it looks like I'm just gonna have to take off work sometime in the spring or fall. Dang it.

By the time you get to the eastern third of Kansas, it starts to look like Missouri. The hills start to roll and the trees thicken up into woods. It starts to feel like an old friend. I was gonna say home, but that's not all the way true. It's home in a nostalgic, familial way. But when I say, "I'm going home" I mean a little house in Woodland Park with a busted screen door and a crazy cat that keeps Don awake all night cuz she misses Lila. When I go to STL, I say "I'm going back to STL". So by the time you hit the eastern third of Kansas, it feels homey to me, even though it's not home anymore. It resonates in my core, I know it well, it brings up a lot of memories, it pushes a jukebox button in my head that plays a Bob Seger song. Jolly Rancher if you can guess which one.

The screen door was fixed by the time I got home.