We're home again.
Home to where the sky stretches wide from horizon to horizon pulling the blue down closer.
Home to where fields have been shaken out onto the landscape like tablecloths for a Parthenopian feast.
Home to streets wide enough enough for four cars but designated for two, to grocery lanes where a shopper can stand awed by the choices and others pass without anyone touching anywhere, to parking spaces drawn for monster trucks and therefore big enough for eight Smart cars, to car dealers with Monster trucks lined up along the curb just as they were before the price of gas doubled.
Home to hope springing eternal.
Home to a closet full of clothes and shoes: goodbye to Sabbatical Spare!
Home to perfect strangers saying “Hi!” just as if you'd known one another for years, and home to teenaged friends of the children wrapping their arms around us and holding tight.
Home to the tractor mower and the lawn bigger than the parking area at the Himmelev grocery store, to deer eating the begonias, to red-winged blackbirds whistling at the birdfeeders, to Milo stealing his way toward a bird in the echinacea.
Home to cheap beef and cheap beer and cheap cheese and giant packages of toilet tissue and cardboard tomatoes and dismal cheese and limp herring, but home again to Easy Bean, our miraculous Community Supported Agriculture bringing us this week Napa cabbage and radishes and broccoli and more, heirloom varieties that taste of some where, of the Cherokee River flowing south to the Minnesota on its way to the Mississippi.
Home to tomatoes planted by my dad already setting fruit and spreading their leaves, and to carrots, their tops lacy as Easter Sunday, the gold hidden, to squash we'll have to thin but haven't found the heart yet.
Home to my mother's chocolate cake, and Pete's cold wine, and Brenda's lilting laughter, and Fylla's gammeldansk (one old Dane deserves another), and Windy's crazy accent, and my sister's voice on the phone now so close though she's in Texas, all the people here who make home home and who we've missed so much in the last eleven months, people I dreamt of being with in a huge room, all of us sitting together in a wide circle, a circle as big as the prairie sky, stretching from loved one to loved one and pulling the blue down.
