Tag: Kansas Day

Finding Kansas (and That's All She Wrote): Everyday Magic, Day 1049

Finding Kansas (and That’s All She Wrote): Everyday Magic, Day 1049

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A KAW Council campout at Lake Kanopolis in 1982 with, from left, Dan Bentley, the late Mark Larson, Kelly Kindscher, Victoria Sherry, me, Suzanne Richman, and in front of us, Joe Greever, and behind us, Ken Lassman, Shannon Greever, Larry, and Dave Ebbert

I was lucky: I found a place that made a satisfying click when I set foot in it, and I knew.

It was April 30, 1982, I was living in Kansas City, MO at the time, and I had never been to Lawrence. In fact, the furthest west I had been was KCK (Kansas City, KS). With my friend Ira, I was heading toward the first Kansas Area Watershed Council gathering, just 15 miles west of Lawrence. Ira and I liked to talk, and at the time, we had some weeks of life details to catch up on, so trying to head out from Kansas City, we missed the exit to I-70. We went around the maze of highways to take another shot at the exit, but talking so fast and much, we missed it a second time…..and a third time. It turns out the fourth time was the charm.

“I want to stop in Lawrence on the way,” Ira told me. There was a great band playing in South Park, the fabled Tofu Teddy. So we did and we danced. It was relatively warm out, sunny, and the world felt light and easy. Then we were hungry, so: enchiladas. Then it was dark, and we decided to spend the night at a friend of a friend’s house, a bungalow in East Lawrence. There were a few extra bedrooms, and whoever owned it was out of town.

Climbing the stairs to the porch of that bungalow on that spring night, lilac, dirt, and wonder in the air, I felt the weight of a voice on my right shoulder. “This is your home for the rest of your life.” A click of recognition went through my body, and I slept soundly that night. The next morning, we would get to KAW, where I met some of the people who became my best beloveds for life, including Ken, who became a good friend, then the love of my life.

Cobra Rock while it was still standing

I also fell hard for Kansas, and I’m still falling. Not just Lawrence, which of course I adore with all its artsy, activist you-can-make-anything-happen-here (but you might not get paid much for it) energy, but often-ignored corners and crannies of the state. Having roamed Kansas widely, as a visiting scholar for Kansas Humanities since 1992, and later, as a Kansas poet laureate — not to mention all the KAW Council campouts in caves and fields, sleeping bags unrolled under Cobra Rock before it collapsed or in Hutchinson living rooms — I’ve seen a lot of this place. But not nearly enough yet.

Put me on a long drive through the Flint Hills or even across the much-maligned Kansas chunk of I-70 going through ranges of hills and high, dry places where you can see 100 miles or more, and I’m a happy camper (sometimes literally). Serve me what surely feels like the official Kansas dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn, and I’m thrilled. Add some fresh apple pie, and what could be wrong with this ailing world?

I’m often enthralled with the communities I’ve dipped into even if they sometimes/often contain people who vote in ways that are incomprehensible to me. I have yet to spend time in any small Kansas town without glimpsing some wild quirks and beyond-any-stereotype humans. “Here’s the master key — just go through every room you want in the hotel and choose whatever you want,” the receptionist at the beautiful, vintage, and haunted (as I soon found out) Midland Railroad Hotel once told me (turned out the whole third floor was once a chicken coop that supplied dinners served on the first floor). I can’t visit Pittsburg without discovering yet another bevy of poets, and I’m sure that town has has many poets per capita as any place in the world. I dig the leftover famous tree stumps in Council Grove and visionaries I’ve met in Garden City. I’ve encountered opera singers on the street, abstract painters who took over old bank buildings for studios, and I even stayed in a grain bin transformed into a bed and breakfast filled with kittens. I’m delighted with the infinity of birds that cross and roost in the flyway as well as all other other wilds ones I’ve seen — bobcats on rare occasion and wild turkeys and massive crows regularly, and once, even a cougar.

I love the expansiveness of this place, the big skies that felt and still feel like the perfect balm for my crowded mind, and after many years, 40 this spring, the exterior has infused the interior. My thoughts and thinking feel less compressed, frenzied, and way less tortured than when I first climbed the steps to that bungalow. I’m home here, and the thing about homecoming is that it’s a continual unfolding and practice, a life-long love affair with being where and who we are. Thank you, Kansas, and hey, Happy Kansas Day!

Celebrate This Kansas on Happy Kansas Day: Everyday Magic, Day 836

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20110520_1115In honor of Kansas statement turning 154 years old, while Kansas land and sky is tens of thousands of years ago, I offer this poem, and one of Stephen Locke’s photos, also published in our collaboration, Chasing Weather: Tornadoes, Tempests, and Thunderous Skies in Word and Image.

Celebrate this sky, this land beyond measured

time that tilts the seasonal light. Dream the return

of the stars, the searing rise of summer or fast spread

of thunderheads, the secret-holding cedars and

witness rocks that migrate across the prairies.

We breathe the air of those who spoke languages

forgotten as the glaciers. We walk the fields

that once fed the fish of inland oceans.

We turn our heads away from where the raccoon

hid his family from the storm hundreds

of generations beforehand. This rain was once

a man’s last wish, this heat what warmed a weathered

rock enough for a woman to rest on with her baby,

these fossils, love songs of memory and longing

after the beloveds die. This horizon the homeland

of butterfly milkweed oranging in ancient sun.

This creek’s trail rerouted by deer and wild turkey.

This wooded curve the one favored by bluebirds

following last summer south. All we see,

the ghost and angel of billions of trails

through grasslands, the remnant of hard rains

where the grandmothers and grandfathers sang

of weather and loss, wars and births.

The bones of this land and the feathers of this sky

know us better than we know ourselves.

Celebrating Kansas Day: Everyday Magic, Day 193

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At 10 a.m., I found myself sitting with the Kansas governor, speaker-of-the-house, majority and minority leaders and other dignitaries on a landing between the steps leading up to the grand entrance to the Kansas Capitol in Topeka. When it was my turn, I read “Celebrate This Kansas,” which you can see at the http://150kansaspoems.wordpress.com site or at the Kansas Arts Commission site.

Sitting the bright sunlight on an unusually warm (thank you!) Kansas day, I was struck by the blue of the sky, the faces in the crowd, and the dignity of the We-Ta-Se American Legion Post 410 Honor Guard, carrying forth the Kansas and U.S. flags along with their tribal symbols. I also love the notion of the posting and then the retiring of the colors as a way to open and close a ceremony.

Despite some hamster-like meandering through the basement of the capitol to get there and get back to the garage, and then finding two entrances in a row closed to the turnpike on the way home, I didn’t feel lost on this shining day. I’m hoping to keep that sense of being a little at home in a changing landscape when others things that are set to be decided in the capitol — some of which directly affect our household and community — come to roost. This is not to say I won’t be doing what I can, but that I’m reminded so much this week how life is far more mysterious and vast than I can imagine, continually posting and retiring its colors.