It was so good to come home to MN after a year- to see my family and friends, and their kids who are so much older and bigger than last year! It was hard seeing everyone because it made me realize how much I love and miss them all, and made leaving that much harder. I have been sitting in Alaska now for a few days reliving my travels and freshly hurting, missing everyone back home. I traveled through a huge chunk of the midwest while I was home- first from the cities to Fergus, then across North Dakota to Bismarck and back, then through southern North Dakota, all of South Dakota and 2/3 of Iowa to Nebraska to see my Omahomies, and then across and up Iowa to get back to the cities and fly out again.
I realized as I was home how much I have missed the midwest landscapes. Especially the trees in winter, with their bare branches and sparseness. In Alaska the huge green spruce trees are so dominant, there isn't the beautiful zen emptiness that the midwest has in the winter- the white-on-white so that you can't tell where the horizon begins and the snow ends, the nakedness of the trees and the huge open skies. It's why I love Charles Beck prints so much. I keep looking back at the pictures I took at home, and thought I would post some.
These are the views of my parent's backyard:
Downtown Fergus Falls- I miss downtowns so much- the only town with any semblance of a downtown around the peninsula is Homer. Everything else is just stores along a highway. I so miss walking through downtowns. Especially Dundee in Omaha- my heart hurt when I was back there.
Lake Alice- I have always loved the canopy of trees over the road in the summer- they don't look too bad in the winter either:
I drove through the country near my parent's house one afternoon, and it felt so good to see the familiar farm scenery:
Icehouses- no one in Alaska uses an ice house for fishing- I miss seeing them scattered across lakes all winter long:
On the drive down I-94 through North Dakota to Bismarck on Christmas day, I shot a few pics through the car window- it was another beautiful, cloudy grey day. I love seeing windbreaks- that man-made symmetry throughout the fields that is so unnatural, and yet having grown up with it, the most normal and common scenery:
The drive back through North Dakota from Bismark the skies were blue for the first time since I'd been home, and the trees were beautiful and frosty white:
After Christmas, I drove down to Omaha. It felt good to drive such a familiar route and re-visit the common sights.
210 to Whapeton was covered in wind-blown snow and drifting the whole way- it was beautiful:
Looking across at some of the world's flattest land:
I-29, entering South Dakota
Watertown- the Terry Redland Center:
Sioux Falls:
Cows on the loose:
Omaha and the old crew:
It was so so good to see everyone, and I miss them so much right now. It's hard to be so far away, and a few days a year just isn't nearly enough time to catch up, but I feel really fortunate for the time that I had
