No Place Like Home

 It’s so clear even now that I can’t completely believe it was all a dream.

The gloss of the flowers, the feeling of snow on my cheeks, the impossible glitter of the colours I can now call ruby and emerald. If only you could make dreams like that happen every night. 

I did try. I’d try to conjure up other places - places away from the pigs and the chickens and the dust. I’d think about the roads I might skip along, the people I might meet. I’d try to think about my ma and pa. 

I was always thinking about escape, about being somewhere else. There was  only so far you could drag your feet, only so many times you could swing on the tyre. In the sun-bleached summer or coldness of winter there were days when it did feel like it was all in sepia. There was a world outside Kansas I just didn’t think I’d ever get to experience it.

I can see the beauty in the emptiness now - the peace in the huge swathes of sameness. The wheat could be ten different shades of gold depending on the time of day. The sky changed all the time too. On clearer days it was like the sky was the ocean - what I imagined it to be. We were about as far away from it as you could get. I’d shape the clouds into waves, turn the birds into fish. There must be something underwater that looks just like a rainbow. It felt like we were always contemplating the sky - it took up so much of our world you couldn’t help it. It revolved around us and our day revolved around it. When is sundown? Does it look like it’ll rain? Of course we had to keep watch for tornadoes too, judging how close one might come. They blew in and out so frequently - about two a month all over the state - that we got used to them in a way. But you can never quite predict how they’ll behave, what way they’ll go. I was terrified of them when I was a little girl - when it felt like they were actual monsters that could pick you up and take you away.

The weather was usually the most exciting about where we were, even if it did scare us. I did love thunder and lightning though - summer storms that lit up dark skies. So when the twister came that day I tried to run away it was kinda thrilling to be in the house instead of the shelter, seeing it all out the window…

I was meant to be talking about the dream, about that place I saw when I opened the front door after the storm. But I’m just going on about what was always on the other side. It shapes you, the place you’re from, can keep a kinda hold on you. I’m almost always thinking about what it means to be home.