No adequate words...

...for the bitterSWEET days I spent saying goodbye to the family farm in North Dakota where my great-grandparents broke ground on a homestead and where my aunt and uncle continued their prairie hospitality and dream. So I will borrow the words of others.

"As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that things truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good."
- Laura Ingalls Wilder

There is no describing [the prairies]…They inspire feelings to unique, so distinct from anything else, so powerful, yet vague and indefinite, as to defy description, while they invite the attempt.

- John C. Van Tramp, Prairie and Rocky Mountain Adventures (1860)

 Then I discovered the prairie, and a slow healing began.

- Stephen R. Jones, The Last Prairie 

 The sea, the woods, the mountains, all suffer in comparison with the prairie…The prairie has a stronger hold upon the senses.  Its sublimity arises from its unbounded extent, its barren monotony and desolation, its still, unmoved, calm, stern, almost self-confident grandeur, its strange power of deception, its want of echo, and, in fine, its power of throwing a man back upon himself.

- Albert Pike (1831-32, Journeys in the Prairie)

 Sunset on the prairie!  It was haunting, unearthly, lovely.

- Marian Sloan Russell, Land of Enchantment (1954)

                                      
 On the plains, there is nothing to obscure your view of the sky, nothing to help you kid yourself that you will not die.  That starkness is beautiful and awful, and completely irresistible.                

- Sandra Scofield (2005, “Genesis” for “Indignities, A Memoir”)

"Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all."
- Laura Ingalls Wilder

Sigh.