don't you worry, child

The Never Ending Story: Winter in South Dakota

The sounds of my Sunday morning: Lena Horne, Rosemary Clooney, Glenn Miller on a radio, background music over cappuccino being poured, mumbled conversation, busy but mellow. People on laptops, alone but all together. Older woman highlighting a book, younger women, teachers, like me, planning the week, seating charts for a class. 

Like me, they are probably from somewhere else. Like me, they come to this shop to plan, to self-soothe, to refresh before Monday comes. 

We come here for our Sunday rituals, sink into the safe warmth of low lighting and booths and coffee. Maybe pick up a dripping, sticky cinnamon bun, a hot cup of Kona, warm from the inside out.

* 

It's hard to be from somewhere else and land here. Dropped here; by choice but unknowing all the same. "The revolving door of South Dakota," they say.

And Longing.

It's a living force, a driving force, and it brings us out here. Away from the flashing lights of the coasts and the glittering oceans of people and Things to Do and Places to Go and out here to the desert. 

To the dry and weary and empty plains. Parched land. Hard, cold earth. Unyielding, unforgiving, unkind.

We are all longing for something or else we wouldn't be out here. Some of us don't even know what that is, what we're looking for. 

Maybe we're looking for the beginning. 

The start of the road, the canku wakan, the red road, the holy road, narrow and rocky. A long dirt road out in the hills that takes you home.

* 

In two months I'll be back in Boston. Back with familiar faces, slink back into the crowd. Not so exposed, so vulnerable.

Because out here that's what you are. All the time. You're from Somewhere Else; you got on a plane far away and came out here, you packed in a suitcase all the bits of yourself you've put together your whole life, landed here, and found that most of what you packed won't survive the winter. 

Sometimes they'll forgive you for it, for not being enough. Sometimes they won't. 

Sometimes the kids will ask you why on earth you would ever want to leave There and come Here? What's Here? And you will respond, "You are here. I came because you are here." And some days this will be true, and some days it won't.

Some days you'll miss the five minute drive to Starbucks, and good seafood, and huge malls, and concerts and movie theatres and being comfortable.

Out here almost every day, multiple times a day, I feel like Jennifer Lawrence falling at the Oscars.

Basically.

But some days the clouds will part and the huge sun will flood the huge sky and the wide open plains with light and warmth and a gentle breeze and you will close your eyes and listen to the silence.

 

This beautiful, scary silence that breaks something open in you. Something you didn't even know was closed.

And it hurts. It hurts to be broken open, poured out like a clay mug.

Or maybe you find yourself outside at night. Outside on the prairie and it's a clear night, the clearest night you've ever seen. And you look up, tilt your head all the way back and you still can't take it all in. It just goes on forever this night sky; and you can see, if you really open your eyes, every single thing that's up there.