i'd swim across lake michigan

My route home from work takes me along a two-lane country highway and along some backroads -- Boss-Man introduced me to it last fall, and I started taking it, not because of its expediency (it's only faster by a minute or two), but because of its remoteness. I have watched, over the past nine months, the fields slowly switch out their wardrobes from autumn to winter to spring and to summer. Half of the commute is through cultivated fields rimmed with forest; half is through partial forests themselves.

I have fallen wildly, irrationally in love with the irrigators. When I first moved to the Midwest, I thought they were the ugliest things I had ever had the misfortune to witness -- huge, spindly, ungainly-looking pipe systems on wheels stretching across the fields. But they sit there all year, patient like the land, silent and still in winter, and now in the dry June active and almost alert. The other day the late afternoon was bright, hot, hazy; the sun pressed down on the whole spread-out world, which looks much bigger out here, under a bigger sky; the clouds piled up white overhead, the trees and fields were jewel-green, and the irrigators dotting the fields as far as the eye could see shot stop-motion fountains of pure white against the blue-and-green backdrop. For a few minutes, driving down the highway that cut through the fields, I was almost too happy to breathe.

Yesterday evening as I drove home and danced in the car to Josh Ritter (there are those artists whose voices you love with your body as well as your heart and mind and soul, and he's one of those for me), I turned down the road onto one of the forested lanes. As I waited for traffic, pulled out and picked up speed and gloried in the "pied beauty" all around me, I realized that I have become a woman perfectly adapted to her environment. I fit into it, and it fits into me.

It's taken me a long time to fall in love with the land. For a couple of years it was painfully difficult; I missed the hills. It was like that Hallmark sequel to Sarah, Plain and Tall -- I couldn't write my name on the land. I resented everything about Indiana, about the Midwest. I didn't like the culture, didn't like the people.

But now I love it, more than I detested it before -- love it with the passion of someone who has chosen her home. Pennsylvania will always be the Home State, and have beauties that no other place can share, and the fact that I was born there will always count for something far deeper than words or any other selected alliance. But I have chosen the Midwest, and that counts for something too.

I realized yesterday that, although I've never stooped down and written my name on the land, it's written its name on me.

So here I am. And, God willing, here I stay.