Prairie

I rode into the town where I currently live for the first time in the spring of 2000 for my job interview. I wanted to put Phoenix behind me. I’d gone there in love with the desert, and I still dream that landscape—the path I hiked every day in my last year there to the top of South Mountain, the rattlesnake’s tail-drumming, the ocotillo’s bright yellow blossoms, the feeling of being always on the edge. And I was on the edge in every way—the only safe place I had was that path, those walks—I needed to get out.

And so, of course, I fell in love with the flat nothingness immediately. The prairie didn’t feel like nothingness—after the mountainous, hot, suffocating desert, the prairie felt open and new and alive, but I wasn’t really seeing it. I saw pieces of the landscape—the corn’s floppy ears, the purple coneflowers straining their one-eyed, wild-haired faces toward the sun, the wetland’s pimpled-green, stagnant surface. If I had an eye at all when I arrived, it wasn’t a wood’s eye or a prairie eye, as Bill Holm describe them in his essay “Horizontal Gradeur”—it was a desert eye. The desert was beautiful in how much it held back, dangerous in how quickly it could enact violence. In contrast, the prairie was rich and full of wonder, its gems hidden in tall grass.

In college, I spent a lot of time sitting next to the Cuyahoga River, writing or lying around thinking about what I would write next, watching the leaves change and fall and the water move slowly toward the Ohio. The Cuyahoga had burned in my early childhood, so when I sat there, watching it heal itself, I thought about all the danger I had escaped by leaving home, how well I finally knew myself now that I had the space and time to feel my body, hear my thoughts. I didn’t know myself, really, but in that time and place I knew myself better than I had before, and that was enough to feel like I could do anything. Maybe my writing, or my work, whatever it might turn out to be, could create some kind of lasting change.

In Phoenix I was close to people involved in the green movement, advocating for more public transportation because the valley was trapping poisonous pollution. But in my mind, the danger in the landscape wasn’t about how humans had damaged the landscape, but about the extreme heat, the rattlers, the cacti. I tried once to press my finger against a saguaro’s needle and realized that any self-destructive urge I’d ever had was gone—I had left the bad relationship, the bars, the other dark places out of the intensity of sun where I’d slid back into a life on the edge like the one I’d had in childhood.

The longer I live on the prairie, the more I learn about the devastation industrial farming has waged on the people and the land. But the prairie feels safe to me in the same way the river-landscape did, though for different reasons. On the winding path through the woods along the Cuyahoga, I couldn’t see far ahead, so I felt both protected and excited about the next turn. Here, there is openness and possibility, and everything is clear. I have loved deeply here, but I also knew when it was time to ease myself out of the long-term partnership, to move on. I have loved many friends and students, too, but I’ve also learned to let them go, to let new people in, as they moved in and out of my college town. Even if the partnership, the friendships, didn’t last forever, there was hope and learning and wonder along the way.

When I visited one of my former students in Seattle, where she is working her first job out of college, She said, “I don’t get it. I miss the prairie.” She confessed that while she loved the mountains, “Sometimes I want to flatten the mountains and just see a little further, you know?” And then, she turned to metaphor, “But I know I’m seeing what I can, the next day’s work, and that’s where I am right now.”

Perhaps I moved to the prairie at just the right time, when I was finally confident enough in my own ability to move and see, finally ready to settle in a place where I could live openly. I love both the garden’s bounty in August and the six-foot drifts in my front yard in March—though I suspect if I knew they would remain all year around I’d love them less. I have changed my life here, become as much a teacher and an activist as I am a writer, committed myself to the people here in the same way my mother had committed herself to her people when I was a kid. I wonder how much the landscape’s openness, its turning and returning has influenced my decision to make this commitment, to weather the ups and downs in my work, to let go of living too intensely to live, instead, intently, day by day.

Still, I am not sure I could call this place home, even after eight years. My family’s three acres and much-too-big house, easily lost when my father fell on hard times, doesn’t feel much like home, never did, even though it holds the memories of my grandmother and mother, their passionate lives and slow deaths. Perhaps it has changed too much, from open, hilly farmland and a mossy lake to small, square lots surrounding a clear, watery hole.

When I went back to Ikaria, the island my parents are from, in 1998, I felt at home for the first time. Everything had changed since my last visit. There was a road going into my father’s village, which meant there was also electricity and heat. It seemed strange to see a tiny German car rolling into the village, teetering on the mountain’s edge, and my uncle, who had traveled most of his life by donkey getting out. Since then, I’ve made regular visits and I always gasp and tear up when the boat rolls into the dock—there is some elemental connection, genetic, I am sure. And yet my family doesn’t know me, not really, except in relation to my parents—my father’s anger and violence and work ethic and risk-taking, my mother’s deep love and laughter and enjoyment of life and early death. They can see all of these things in the way I live when I am with them, and they will tell me this directly at times—or sometimes, indirectly, calling me, accidentally, by my mother’s name. The language I’d known intimately as a child comes harder to me now, and my relatives poke fun, say I’ve gone too far away.

If only they knew. There is nothing similar whatsoever to the life my parents lived and the life I live now—not landscape, not language, nothing. And yet, in my most recent visits, I’ve felt, instead of loss, some kind of integrity, some connection between who I was before my birth and who I am now.

My daughter has no roots like these, so I know I am lucky. Her only home has been a landscape. “If I could forget everything about my life before this except the mountains and the ocean, I’d be happy,” she told me during her first week with me. Three months later, as her adoption date grows closer, she tells me she hates the mosquitoes, despises the winter cold. “But I’ll stay anyway, because this house is the only place I’ve ever felt safe in my life,” she said, offhandedly, the other day. She is in the process of acquiring things—friends, mentors, clothes, artwork, dolls and stuffed animals (to reclaim the childhood she never had), even a mom. I, in contrast, gave away several boxes of belongings in order to make space in my home for her. I have learned in my eight years here that nothing is permanent, but now, suddenly, I have someone who will be, most likely, a permanent fixture in my life until I die.

This is another lesson of the prairie—nothing is permanent, and yet, everything comes back. My own childhood suffering came back when I took her in, but I learned I could feel and remember without losing myself. My own rootedness came back when a rootless child came into my home, and I found, for the first time, integrity between the island-home that was never really home and this big-skied prairie.

Yesterday, my daughter and I walked the dog at the wetlands and admired the colors, purple and yellow and red-stemmed tall grasses, and the animals, dragonflies and butterflies and pelicans and geese. This could be my favorite time of year, but I feel the same way every year when the leaves change, and when the first snowfall sticks. It is easy, at least for me, to be in love with a place that changes somewhat predictably but still keeps me uncomfortable enough to take risks, to fall in and out of love, to open my heart to friends and students who will leave, to a child who doesn’t have any idea what it means, at all, to have a home, but is settling, slowly, into this prairie-life.