Great Plains

What better time to change things up around here than the first week of September? Just a wee tweak to my blogging schedule — as of today, I’m adding Sundays to the mix. Twice each month I’ll be linking over to Her View from Home, a great new website based right here in Nebraska.

The other two Sundays each month you’ll find a slice of quiet here, a photo and verse with Sandra’s and Deidra’s communities.

So my posting schedule will be Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Sunday. How’s that work for you? Okay, good, I was hoping so!

Here’s today’s post: My Place on the Great Plains

“What’s your absolute favorite place, Mommy?” he asks, as we sit at the kitchen counter with our toasted bagels and sliced strawberries. When I tell my seven-year-old son that I don’t think I have one absolute favorite place, he’s nothing short of horrified.

“What? Not even the cabin? The cabin’s my absolute favorite place,” says Rowan, referring to our family cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior. “You need to find your favorite place.”

…Will you join me over at Her View from Home, where I am writing about faith and place today?

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It’s blowing so hard dust swirls in a cloud across the gravel lot, raining grit on the windshield and coating the van. The sign says the nature center doesn’t open until noon, but the kids beg and plead and we’ve driven 25 minutes from town, the wracking wind bullying us across the yellow dotted line.

I say yes, let’s stay. The building itself may be closed, but the prairie is always open.

Open.

I stand on the rise, hair tangled across my eyes, and I shake my head, laughing, because it was exactly this – this wide open land, this vast space I called “nothingness” – that I’d dreaded so much. I didn’t cry when I first heard I’d be moving to Nebraska. I was simply quiet with a sick dread. I had deemed Nebraska among my top five worst places to live – third behind only North Dakota and Nevada. How would I survive life in a giant rectangular state filled with nothing but corn and cattle?

And now? Now I can’t get enough of these huge skies and low clouds, rippling grass, flash of gold wing, hot wind.

The boys skip, each with a bag of baby carrots in his hand. Noah spots scarlet on black, and a red-winged blackbird trills from the willow. Rowan crouches, tall grass itching his calves, to watch a caterpillar on a balance beam blade. I tip my head back far to glimpse a dipping, soaring, wheeling hawk, graceful daredevil of the plains.

We sit out of the wind on the wooden bridge, dangle our feet over a chartreuse marsh, spy on the still frog.

He doesn’t move. Neither do we. I resist the urge to hurry the boys along. A hot summer day on the prairie seems like the perfect time to break a bad habit.

“Who despises the day of small things?”
Zechariah 4:10

{Pictures from Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center, near Denton, Nebraska.}

What’s your favorite way to spend a day of small things?

Welcome to Graceful Summer, a new link-up community here on Fridays through the end of August. We’re sharing stories about the smaller, quieter moments of summer – will you share yours, too?

1. Write your post and link it up here on Fridays.

2. Visit someone else and leave a little comment love – you might get a new creatively quiet idea!

3. Please include the Graceful Summer button or a link in your post, so people can find us if they want to join in.

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