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| Caught in a side view mirror |
When
my family moved to Kansas in 2000, the prospect of adjusting to a new
community brought great trepidation. I imagine the feeling was similar to that
of a settler’s wife, she who might have come west more than a century
earlier, around 1880, as a young bride.
The
young bride may be akin to a state of mind, the wistfulness that comes from
leaving what is comfortable and moving to unfamiliar territory.
Perhaps
the Civil War has just ended, and she is following her husband to a strange
flat land of extreme temperatures and wary natives, where most news of the
outside world comes from the Methodist circuit rider who pays monthly visits to
conduct a revival or perform a baptism.
That
was me, trailing my husband out to the Plains, hopefully anxious and anxiously
hopeful – a young bride, figuratively speaking, wishing to feel at home in millennial
Kansas. For despite the homogenization of American culture, communities do maintain
distinctive social structures. I found that it would be necessary to acquire a
local state of mind in order to fit in.
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| View from a Target parking lot; Overland Park, Kansas |
From its earliest days as a territory, Kansas challenged those who made the journey. Whenever the pioneers reached their destination – whether by covered wagon after the Homestead Act of 1862 or by train during the rise of the Populist / agrarian movement a few decades later – they found unpredictable weather and unbroken land.
Even
before they got to the place, there were premonitions. One pioneer woman would recall:
To me Kansas spelled
destruction, desperadoes, and cyclones. I could not agree with my husband that
any good could come out such a country, but the characteristic disposition of
the male prevailed, and October
1, 1879 , saw us bound for the “Promised Land.”
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| A dairy farm lingered in suburban Johnson County, Kansas |
My family arrived in mid-July and waited for the temperature to cool. Day after day – 107, 105, 106. Occasionally, a faint prairie wind blew through. We stayed inside nearly all the time, enacting the nineteenth-century drama of the parlor darkened by curtains pulled against the sun.
Would the doorbell ring? Would the minister pay a
call on the new family? That did not happen.
Eventually the heat diminished, and our two sons began
the school year. I started to find my way, always driving, along the wide
streets and through the startling checkerboard of big-box stores and fields filled with hay bales.
By the time of the High Holy Days in October, we
were invited to break the fast at the home of neighbors, where the hostess’s
famous ten-layer Jell-O mold, presented in the world’s largest trifle dish, arose
in the center of the buffet.
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| Land for sale |
It’s
not easy to understand why any individual will become comfortable in certain
places and not others. There are cities and towns where the fit is right, and
we discover with pleasure what Willie Morris called “terrains of the
heart.”
We
do not need to be kept in familiar boxes in order to feel sure of
ourselves. However, there are things we grow to as a habit without which we may
not be happy.
Of
course, I did not appreciate Kansas while we were there. That’s an old
story. Farther down the road, when I was
no longer a young bride, it became possible to know and understand the place.
Photos by Claudia Keenan
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/08/at-home-in-kansas.html
