It is officially springtime in Kansas. 



Potatoes are in the ground and lettuce leaves are light green and delicately delicious. Twenty-two baby chicks arrived safely through the mail early last week, and five organic piglets are expected any day now. 



New green grass is poking its way toward the sunlight. Soon -- with some help from the local ranchers and their controlled burns -- bluestem and butterfly weed will blanket these ancient and subtly beautiful hills. 

 As surprised as I still am to find myself living 65 miles from nowhere in rural America, I’ve got to say, I love our new life. 



We will never really fit in here. 
 
We’ll always be those "quirky" transplants from Chicago who built a house off-the-grid, and purposely had a baby when they should have been concentrating on growing old gracefully. 



But there are advantages in standing just outside of the circle of what feels comfortable.

Newcomer’s eyes

I hope I always view these hills with newcomer’s eyes. I hope I’m always just this awestruck by the size of a heron alighting in the field across the road, or the glow of a bluebird’s feathers in the sun. I hope I continue to marvel at every single turtle that pops its head up in the middle of our pond. 



Our little boy learned to identify Venus in the sky by the time he was 15 months old. I can’t wait to see the other ways in which his childhood and worldview will be radically different from mine. 


I hope I always appreciate other people as much as I did last Saturday, when one new friend drove 18 miles and another three times that far, just so that we could enjoy a morning together with our children.

And I wish I had always been just this conscious of how I commit my time and energy. It becomes easier to say "no" when attending a committee meeting means 135 miles round trip. 



If you’d have asked me 20 years ago, or even 10, I’d have told you that I am a city dweller through and through: Condo, public transportation, four yoga classes a week, ready access to a perfect margarita any time of the day or night...the works. 



Today I will tell you that I miss that life. Oh, yes. I miss it. Every day. I’ve lost some of who I am, and I grieve for it.

Sometimes it’s okay to lose

It’s tempting, as we reach middle age and beyond, to become fearful of making choices that involve loss. Perhaps it’s that we come to realize that we have already lost our youth and will eventually lose our lives. It makes us want to hang on tightly to everything else.

Choosing among competing values

When I followed my husband’s dream and moved from Chicago to Kansas three years ago, I chose my core values of romantic love and adventure over life-long friendships and diversity of experience. I chose happiness, but I also made myself vulnerable to grief.

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