Kansas - My home state.
I am from the middle of the country and the town I grew up in is in the middle of the state so if you look at a map of the US and put your finger down on what looks like the center of the country you will cover up my home county. The western 2/3s of the state is mostly flat. The eastern 1/3 has trees and hills.
Every little town has a grain elevator to hold the wheat after harvest. At night if we went about a mile north of my little town (pop. 250) we could see the lights of eleven other little towns around us. In other words, you can really see a great distance because there are no trees or hills to block the view.
My great grandmother was the first woman to serve on the Board of a Coop. My family has been in Kansas for 140 years. Like most from my part of the state I am German. The town I grew up in had one church - Methodist. The thing about Methodists - they are all about living by the Golden Rule. The other thing they are about - it takes a village. It takes a village to raise the children and get in the crops.
Members of my family are still in that part of the world and the thing that blows me away is the amount of volunteerism. They never sit still. They are always busy raising money for the women's shelter, reading to 2nd graders (the men), putting up and taking down flags on flag day, cooking for an event (like graduation party for children in foster care), just figuring out a way to help someone they know who is having a hard time (like a single mother, or providing a ride to the doctor, or staying with a new widow), attending a community concert fundraiser, or going to funerals. Funerals are important because everyone knows everyone else. In fact, your kids are friends with their kids, and your parents were friends with their parents and your grandparents were friends with their grandparents, and great grand parents, and so on.
Kansans in small towns don't look the other way - they step in to help in whatever way they can and they are creative.
But they are all Republicans. To them there are good Republicans and bad Republicans and it would never occur to them to vote for a Democrat. However, many voted for Obama because they consider him a Kansan. Now I am just talking about my part of the state and my family. The rest of the state - not so much. And all of those Republicans are moderate to liberal in their views. They just don't understand how they fit into the national political set and they do keep voting against their own self interest.
Things I miss - open spaces, open skys, the world's best lightning show, rolling thunder clouds, sharing the road with tractors and Amish buggies (over in the next county), jack rabbits running the road in front of your headlights, great desserts, unsweet iced tea on the table at every meal (including the winter), windmills and oilwells, wheat swaying in the fields for as far as you can see, the colors of the sunset.
The thing I don't miss the WIND; the unrelenting wind.
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