Retreat

A few months ago, I spent about five days on a solo retreat on my family's farm in North Dakota. It was not as solo as I anticipated, because I still have friends there to visit and host, but they made the time all the more rejuvenating. A few photos of the farm are posted here. Regrettably, I don't have any digital or scanned photos of our modest lakes; they provide such wonderful places of respite for me, even among the cow dung and prairie cactus and prickly grass. There is nothing quite like sitting on a warm rock under the sun knowing that every tree in sight was planted by kinfolk. On a breezy day the mosquitoes can't land and the waves of the lake sing you to sleep.

The scenery may not look like much to many people, but to me they are representations of honest work with strong hands, freedom of the soul and peace of the heart. No doubt my great-grandmother did not romanticize the land so when she and her brother first settled this land in the 1890s. My father, too, surely has plenty to say about the toil and sacrifice that it demanded of him. But I, now considered an Urbanite, cannot shed my identity as a farmer's daughter, and so I wax poetic about the riches of a land David Letterman recently joked is used primarily for storage.





Note: This wind farm was recently constructed by a foreign company about one hour north of our farm. There are over 70 turbines in total.