It was not a particularly warm place, nor was she personally, at least not compared to my grandmother and her big house with wooden and upholstered furniture and wood floors and wide arching doorways and cooking smells that constantly radiated from Grandpa's kitchen. Aunt Alice and Uncle Melvin took exotic vacations, probably on airplanes. They talked of their children who lived far away because of exotic jobs. Uncle Melvin had slicked back hair and I remember his clothes as being rather glossy somehow. He had some of those cool shirts that you didn't have to tuck in from some exotic foreign country. Ah, yes, they were the most glamorous couple I knew. And Aunt Alice herself was the keystone of that glamor, I was certain. And one of the most glamorous things about my glamorous great aunt was that she smoked. She had crystal and chrome ash trays everywhere. Enormous wonders that were more a shrine to the glamor of smoking than functional, for she would never ever let any but the tiniest bit of ash accumulate in their massive bowls. Some had lighters build into them. Best of all, next to her sleek accent chairs, even in her kitchen next to the dining table, she had smoking stands. A little shelf or perhaps a small drawer held cigarettes and the top was solely dedicated to the holding of the resting cigarette and the collection of the ashes. I remember a chrome and black smoking stand and another that had a chrome base and chrome bowl separate by a sculptural exotic wood stand. I remember the crystal and silver bowl of another. I remember her gesturing, sometimes broadly, sometimes in little quick movements, with a cigarette in her hand, smoke curling and twisting and rising. I remember her telling some story and the measure of how upset or excited she was about the goings-on could be had by how much her hand shook when she went to flick the ashes into the ash tray. I have vague memories of my sister and I sitting cross legged on the floor, our elbows on our knees and our chins in our hands, doing nothing but watching this exotic creature do her glamorous exotic things with rapt attention, but I am sure we were never quite that blatant in our astonishment and admiration. Ah, it is a wonder I am not a smoker just to emulate Aunt Alice. What accumulation of effects in my childhood made the desire to be good and healthy, to refrain from smoking, overcome the lure of the glamor of Aunt Alice?
The nurses are waiting for the doctors to tell them and the doctors are waiting for the test results to come back and even then, it is all a guessing game. But they find the good signs and they tell you about them and sometimes that is a good thing because it helps you not worry so much and makes the waiting easier. But sometimes, they tell you a good thing and it is a false sign or a transient moment and then when things go bad, the crash is worse. But they don't know that when they try to paint the picture in the best colors they can find and they mean well and when things crash, they crash for them too and when there is reason for joy, it touches them too. They don't really know, but what they lack for knowing, they make up for in wanting and caring too.
sign went up; what situation caused someone to letter and paint a sign. Often, the use of the area has changed and the sign's wording has not been applicable for many years, but the sign stays, rusting and fading a bit each year. 
Every day that I was there, these strange flat small yellow people guarded this door. It must be some kind of secret club's meeting room or clubhouse or maybe they just keep their secret club regalia there or maybe it is something darker, but it is difficult to think of small yellow people as capable of dark thoughts and acts. I imagine happy things behind that door, though I know not why they would hesitate to share them with the rest of us. I asked them questions and they refused to answer. If I talked to them too long, the human people in the area gave me looks that indicated to me that they are protective of their flat yellow friends and that they wanted me to respect their privacy. I asked it they minded if I took their picture, and they did not say no, so I took the liberty. But they never did talk to me, so their mission and the nature of what is behind the door they guard remains a mystery.
For a crazy few days, she read the news from her local papers online. I had wonderful fantasies of being able to carry on email conversations with her, sending her the latest photos of the kids, scanning and sending report cards, orchestra concert programs, Boy Scout Court of Honor programs, and other assorted documentation of bragging rights. I imagined the boys emailing their grandma and sharing songs with her, and becoming closer to her in a relationship that could continue on into college via the great and wonderful internet. Then one day, she went to print out a recipe from the Aberdeen American News, and somehow, the Pizza Puff recipe printed instead. And printed. And printed. 
She tried everything to stop it. Turning off the machine, unplugging it, taking out the battery, power cycling the printer itself, turning the machines all off and starting over. We visited a few day later and I did not believe her and went boldly back to the guest room where the disobedient machines lived. I turned them on and . . . out came a Pizza Puff recipe! And another. And another. I pulled the plugs. Somehow, weeks later, my sister got the electronic duo to stop printing copy after copy of the Pizza Puff recipe but mother was stung. Unwilling to ever go back. Ruined for computer technology. The poor laptop became resigned to serving as a game station and a movie watching screen for the grandkids. 
The printer and internet connections are still there, and I have since used them when I visit, but never again will my mother attempt to access the wild world of the world wide web. Sometimes the kids and I will wistfully wish Grandma had email. Today we could email her birthday greetings. A photo of the boys back together for the summer. Pictures of the flowers in the back yard. A shot of the new car. But no, Grandma does not do email or anything else internet-related, not since the "...Pizza Puff Incident."
Snow is so lovely.
We went down to Columbia over the holidays. They grow the good stuff in that area and they have piles and piles of it waiting shipment. I 'went home' for the holidays with my family. But what is 'home'. In that context, it typically means the residence of ones childhood. For me, that is a ranch style house built in 1961 on a former corn farm in rural North Dakota. There is the house with its deck that my dad built surrounded by shelter belts we cultivated against our will as children and grain storage bins that hold the grain raised by renters now. Specific familiar things. Last year, my mother was in a nursing home after a surgery but we based ourselves out of the house at the farm anyway. It was technically 'home' but without any parents there, it did not feel much like home. It was a house, a convenience, a shelter from the weather with a refrigerator for keeping the Mountain Dews cold and beds for keeping our bodies warm while sleeping between visits to the people that matter. In January, when I went to visit my mother in the nursing home, I based myself out of her condo where she spends winters. Because I was only a few minutes from her room at the nursing home, that place at that time felt more like 'home' than the farmhouse had a month earlier. Even though it has no history to me as a childhood home, her things were there and I knew she would return to that place soon. This visit, when the farmhouse, the actual residence of my childhood, was closed up, we based ourselves out of my mother-in-law's house, and again, though I have no history actually living there, it felt more homelike than the empty farmhouse. All this leads me to believe that is it so much less about the place than it is about the people. 'Home' can be anywhere, as long as you are with people who you love and with people who love you back.
On the border between North Dakota and South Dakota, there stands a new wind farm. With 61 towers on the north side of the state line and 59 on the south side, it is a magnificent sight. The towers are in a linear cluster that is perpendicular to the direction of prevailing winds, so that it runs southwest to northeast. It runs along a slight rise that interrupts the otherwise flat plains landscape, called the Coteau des Prairies Ridge. Much of the land in this area, due to the sandy soil and the hilly undulating topography is dedicated to cattle pasture rather than crops, and the cattle do graze unfazed by their new neighbors. Approaching from the west, with the low afternoon sun behind the car, the towers glowed white under the white clouds.
I don't know where the Magic Line of Dining Time Name Change lies, but in Illinois where I reside most of the time, 'lunch' is the noon meal and 'dinner' is the evening meal. In North Dakota and South Dakota where 'the relatives' and 'the in-laws' reside, 'dinner' is the noon meal and 'supper' is the evening meal and at least on farms, 'lunch' is what the farmers stop and have as a snack mid-afternoon or what people visiting in the evening have before they part company, as in "Well, I guess we best be going," followed by "Oh, stay a bit longer and have a little lunch," which means coffee and some cookies or cake or pie. If there was a sign along Interstates 90 and 94 telling me where this Magic Line of Dining Time Name Change is, I would have an easier time remembering to reset my definitions upon heading 'back home' and back home.
When I was kid, we hardly ever saw this. It wasn't until after we figured out DDT was a bad thing and until after we ceased to use it and the hawks started to return that we realized they had been missing for all those years. Now you see them perched on fence posts, on the posts that hold utility wires, on the skeletons of dead cottonwood trees, on the tops of the largest of the hay and straw bales, and you see them flying and gliding and diving overhead and along the road. They are beautiful. I am glad they are back.
As a child, I took it for granted, the unending flatness of it, and had an odd notion of the word 'hill'. As a teen, I resented the boringness and distance and sameness of it all and could not wait to get out, as in 'get the hell out of here'. As a young adult I hated that it was a barrier of many long boring miles of car travel to seeing family and old friends. I really only began to give it a chance as being beautiful when a professional art photographer friend sent me photographs that treated it as a place of unique beauty and made me look closer for the details and appreciate the sense of place that is wrapped up in the horizon, the perspective, the vast plain and the vast sky. I have long loved the scenic beauty of the southwest desert, the rock formations and canyons. The epic beauty of the Rocky Mountains is common knowledge. The forests of the northeast and places like Kentucky where I have traveled are taken for granted as beautiful. I have more recently loved the rambling hills of Wisconsin. But now I have come to see the flat plains as another unique form of landscape that is every bit as beautiful, and I am taking it as a self-assigned project to capture some of that in photographs. It is a magical thing to stop the car and step out into the bean field and feel the wind through your clothes and hair and hear the chirping of thousands of grasshoppers and the rustling of the leaves of the bean plants. It is interesting to leave the car to wander the ditch of the narrow roads and find shorter versions of the prairie plants that are familiar to me, remnants of what once covered this vast land. The little bluestem along the roadsides glows russet in the late afternoon light. The clouds pile up on each other and recede to the horizon in layers of light and dark. The sun lights corn tassels a glowing orange-red and lights the nearly ripe bean fields a glowing yellow and the stubble of already harvested small grain fields glows soft gold. Light plays on the land and the sky to make ever changing colors and tints and shades and I am trying to learn to capture it. It might be my greatest challenge as a photographer to capture and convey the beauty of this place, for it is a hard beauty to love in its vast endlessness and its harsh extremes. But as I learn to love it, I also want to share it in pictures and words. Go there sometime, not just passing through, but with it as a destination, and drive its smaller roads and get out and just be there. You might be as surprised as I am at the power and beauty of the place.
The first time I saw wind towers was at night when the pattern of their blinking lights across the cornfields echoed the constellations of stars in the sky overhead. The lights were interrupted by the graceful sweep of the blades and I was frustrated that I could not see more in the dark. By daylight, I find their beauty mesmerizing.
Those who visit with me have to drag me away, for I cannot get enough of their strange simple beauty. They are graceful and elegant yet strong and sturdy. When their blades move in the wind, they hypnotize. They are of nearly perfect classic aesthetic beauty with proportions of thirds and fifths. Their white towers and blades catch the sun and echo the brightest whites on the clouds on an overcast day.
The turbines make a low rumbling sound, quiet enough that you can have conversation and hear nearby grasshoppers and birds. The blades make a rhythmic whooshing sound as they slowly sweep though the air. I love to sit on the low steps at the base with my back to the metal so that I can feel the sound as I watch others in the distance do their slow dance.
I hope it is the clean energy they tell us it is. I know there are issues with the energy it takes to make and transport them and with transmission of the energy to where it is needed. I know there are questions about how to solve the gaps in the windy weather. But if such beautiful structures can give us energy from the wind that is clean and bounded only by the days the wind blows in places like Wisconsin and Illinois and the Dakotas, it will be a wonderful future indeed.
