Before coming to the States, I had some notion of the Midwest as all Little House on the Prairie. Small towns would be neighborhoodly places with characters straight out of the head of Garrison Keillor. In Chicago it would be perpetually snowing. (Almost right with that one, although today my preoccupation is more with the eleventy-billion insect bites I suffered yesterday and I’m pretty sure if it were snowing that would mean no mosquitoes.)
Finally, I’m not sure I consciously thought about it, but I’m pretty sure I always expected prairie to be sandy, unproductive and not remotely green. I don’t know where this image came from – I was picturing something utterly unattractive. The driving we’ve done through the Midwest has mostly been through flat, agricultural country. Plenty of green from the John Deere, but there’s farm planting right up to the Interstate. We’ve seen an abundance of farmsteads that look as though they are just waiting to be scooped up and dropped in Oz at the merest whiff of a tornado.
And I had no idea that I my mental images were so wrong until confronted with restored prairie in Elizabeth, IL. Having dutifully read the description of how volunteers had reseeded the area to resemble the original prairie meadows I was a little confused. Then we went out to photograph what is essentially a wildflower meadow. Who knew?
Only everyone else.
In my head Laura Ingalls Wilder was looking for gophers in entirely different topography.
Maybe I was thinking of the Wild West?