Local Color

These are just a few of my favorite "atmosphere" pictures from the years we've lived here. Living on the prairie, we have an excellent prospect of the sky and the horizon almost all the time. If a storm is coming up, we watch it roll in from miles away. Tornado? Yeah, we'd see it. But we've only seen one tornado in all the years we've been here. It went between our house and the neighbors' house to the south. At least, I think it did. That's where it was headed when we spotted it, but as soon as we spotted it I was headed for the basement with three kids in tow. When a storm has passed, you can tell by the quality of the light if there's going to be a rainbow. I love it when we can see a complete double rainbow. Doesn't happen often though. Other perks of living on the prairie include being able to see the fireworks displays of four communities from our yard. (Not to mention all the "unsponsored" displays on half a dozen farmsteads around us.) And when the sun comes up, our house casts a mile-long shadow across the field behind our house. And every couple of years or so, we'll have a knockout Northern Lights display. The last good one was spread out over two thirds of the visible sky—and the whole hemisphere of the sky is visible here. We watched that for an hour.

Other things sometimes roll in, too. Every couple of years, a deer runs behind our yard, even though there's no cover for half a mile in any direction. One time Banks came in from the barn to tell me that there was some kind of animal in the barn. "Well, what kind of animal?" "I don't know." "What does it look like?" "Well, it's pretty big, and it's brown." "Well, that would have to be a woodchuck then. Let's go see." So out we go to the barn. It wasn't a woodchuck, but it was brown and it certainly was big. I actually couldn't tell what it was myself until I walked in on it a bit and it wheeled away from me. "Whoa. That's a beaver." The closest river is almost seven miles away. The closest stream—which is just a trickle—is half a mile away. But according to the DNR guys who came out to get him, young male beavers will sometimes travel overland in search of new habitat. That still leaves some unanswered questions, but I think they'll have to remain unanswered.