"Sing the rain on the roof on a summer night..."

Do you think it's a sign that I should be living somewhere else when changes in the weather that even hint toward seasonal shifts make me so homesick I think seriously about taking I-5 south to I-90 east out of the city, rather than to work?

I miss big weather. I miss blizzards, thunderstorms, tornadoes, winds I can barely walk against, and all the rest of it. Big weather's not always a picnic. Sometimes it's devastating. With nothing but loneliness for it as context though, I even miss worrying about big weather. I miss the collective bargaining Plains people do with big weather. It's conversation with God, negotiation with The Fates, and often even strategy based on hard data and/or experience. Regardless, at some point, you gotta just sit back and watch the show. Watch. The. Show. Here's the thing about big weather: it's not about you yet it encompasses you. It connects you to the people to whom you belong over generations of stories, all of which are seated in the context of big weather. "That was the year it was so hot the corn burned up before we even hit August." "The drift was right up to the eaves of the barn on south side, and we were sliding down from the peak." "My main memory of that storm was coming up out of the basement in the morning to find the willow tree out back of the house was coming in through the back door."

I miss openness. Nothing pisses me off like someone referring to my home as "the middle of nowhere." The Plains are not easy to get to know and I get that. (Being from there, I don't feel that in my chest, but I understand that it's true for many people.) I think I first understood that after reading Willa Cather for the third or fourth time. Cather was a transplant, and it took her some time to come to love the region, but she did come to love it. I rarely hear others speak of the Plains at all. When they do, it's usually to bemoan the "lack of" something. When I drive home and roll through the Badlands, Sandhills, and family farms of north central and northeastern Nebraska, all I feel is openness. There are so many stories there...of family and love and tyranny and oppression and steadfastness and manipulation and peace and persistence and violence and community and genocide and resilience and hopefulness and...so many stories, and if the people of the Plains seem tight-lipped and wary of outsiders, sometimes it might be that they think everyone can see what truly only they witness, that all those stories are stretched out and exposed, as part of a landscape of pure openness that offers nothing to hide behind or under.

I miss people being quiet for awhile.