“Do you think it's weird that I want to drive a grain truck for a while?” my friend Monica asks me over the phone.

“A grain truck? Seriously?” I tap my key board as I talk and notice that it is filthy, embarrassing almost. The keys are sticky and filled with crumbs. The entire board is splattered with coffee drips. Disgusting, I think. Five years of pecking out emails while I hold a sandwich—not wanting to lose time to eat lunch—has started to show.

I visualize Monica, who is working in San Francisco. I see her in a loft with high ceilings and little geometrical work stations lined with Macs. I imagine people wearing dark rimmed eye-glasses, suit-coats, torn jeans, and sneakers, popping their head into her office and flashing a white smile against tanned skin. Monica herself is covered with tattoos and wears only eighties vintage clothing, an appearance probably more reflective of her passion for music and pop-culture than her day job at a publishing house.

In contrast my office is in a closed, dark corner of a building in Minneapolis. My walls are neutral. My plants are dying. My view is a parking lot. “Your very OWN office? Our baby girl is so important!” my mom would say, looking around at the same space, not noticing the depressing vanilla walls, the crusty plants, or my parking lot view—thrilled by the fact that her baby girl has somehow managed to find herself an executive position with all of the perks.

“Yes. Seriously,” Monica continues, “I was thinking I could come home—maybe just for a few months—and drive truck through harvest. I could live in that old farm house on my parents' land and then figure out what to do afterwards,” she pauses. “You know…. I think I'm just ready to get out. I'm ready to leave the city. Plus—seriously—how hard would it be to learn how to drive the truck again? I drove when I was fourteen! I mean—I can certainly figure out how to drive now.”

“Oh my God. You'd be fine.” I give her the old 'you'd be fine' hand wave, as if she can see me. “Pick it back up in no time,” I say.

Monica and I are both children of the North Dakota prairie. She grew up in a tiny town near the northern border of the state. I grew up on a farm near a tiny town at about the same longitude on the southern boarder. Both small towns are identical in description. They have a railroad that runs through the center, a grain elevator, a gas station, a Catholic church on one side of town, a Lutheran church on the other, and a few bars in between. In fact, our home towns fit the description of most North Dakota small towns.

“I can see you driving a grain truck.” I continue, savoring the vision of my thirty-something-San Francisco-tattooed-DJ-friend, with dyed black hair, driving a grain truck down the gravel roads. Then I imagine all of us—those who left North Dakota—coming back, settling in with the farmers, filling the small town bars at night, Schmidt beer in hand, talking about literature and the grain markets.

“You can?” Monica asks.

“Yes. In fact, maybe we should buy a little farm together; drive truck for some cash…” I grab a tissue and start working on a coffee blot on my keyboard while I consider our long-term options. “Yeah. Maybe you could start a band and play in the bars at night. I mean, what else is going on there? Um…Nothing. You'd probably be a hit! Then, after harvest, we could take a road trip. Tour North Dakota. I'll be your crew,” I pause, not quite sure if crew is the word I am looking for, I am not into the music scene and feel immediately not so hip. “Or—I'll do something. Carry your guitar? Play the drums? I don't know.”

“Would you? Really? You'd come to North Dakota to be my roadie?” she laughs.

“Yes! I will. Why not!”

I think of my parent's farm during harvest right then, how harvest nights in the middle of the country seem almost cosmopolitan: bright, moving, awake, and alive. The moon glows like an orange pumpkin in the sky. Trucks light up the yard as they come in from the fields to empty their bounty. Once drained, they return to the dark night for another hit of golden crop from the combines. All of this activity stirs the crisp, corn-filled air, which makes it smell like someone is baking sweet muffins from somewhere deep within the earth. All the while, real cooking is happening inside, where Mom is making hamburgers and fried onions for my dad and brother who will come in exhausted and dirty well past ten o'clock.

“You know, Mo, I think you should make the move.” I turn my keyboard upside down and watch the crumbs fall out like dirty snow. “I think we should.”

Monica and I both left North Dakota after college and moved to the city where we hoped to find something that existed beyond the prairie. At the time, this something was unspeakable—our shared secret. But now that we are in our thirties, it just might be time to return home—at least for a sabbatical of some sort—and confront the reasons we left.

“Yes! I think it is time to change our lives!” Monica cheers in her calm and ecstatic way; like a happy, tattooed monk.

“I know. I could really use a break from work. From life. From the traffic and the busyness. I mean, how long can we go on like this!” I am being dramatic now, resorting to our college chatter. It is easy to fall into this lingo with Monica. In college we spent long nights together in her small, carpeted apartment talking about our lives. She played her electric guitar without an amp. I sat across from her on her Salvation Army couch, chewing sunflower seeds and spiting them into a blue mug. The next morning we would do the same. She sat in her ripped pajamas, picking at her electric guitar, and I drank coffee from the same blue mug. I often crashed for the night at her place, too tired to drive across town to my own bed in a small house I shared with three other women. I am about to remind her of this, of our time together, when someone pops a frenzied head in my office.

“Hey, ah, you got a minute?”

I keep my eyes on the intruder and switch to my I-am-at-work-and-trying-to-be-professional-voice, which I can barely pull out for Monica. “Excuse me, Monica. Can I interrupt you for just one minute? Yes. Sorry. Let's talk soon and seriously consider our…our….” I look at the person standing in my door, “our future business proposition.”

She gets my drift. “Oh sure. Yes. Call me later.”

After I deal with the person who wants to know if I can set up a meeting to discuss something we had just discussed, I look out of my window. I notice the landscape: the parking lot, the cement, the buildings, the way my eye is stopped by a delivery truck, blocking my view of the earth.

I am lucky, aren't I? Let's add it up. One: In my early thirties and successful for my age, with a team of thirty and budget of millions. Two: A home in the city with access to restaurants and film. Three…. Three… What is THREE?

I am happy, right?Why, then, does the thought of listening to AM radio and pulling my truck up to a grain elevator in a small North Dakota town have my heart fluttering with excitement? Why does the vision of sitting in a little North Dakota bar hitting a tambourine against my thigh, while Monica sings to a crowd of men in John Deere hats and women in over sized sweatshirts, make me ache with purpose?

I throw my tissue away, take a breath, accept my dirty keyboard, and go back to work. Both Monica and I know that our day dream of another life—in this case, returning to a past life—will probably only carry us through the next hour. Returning home would be impossible. Or would it?

***

Over the last ten years I have been trying to resolve a seemingly simple dilemma: How to tell the state of North Dakota that I am gay. This might sound crazy, but if you are from the heart of the country you might understand that you are part of a world that is more connected than any social networking phenomenon of the digital age. Your personal profile is peeked at, commented on, and updated at every home-town shower, funeral, wedding, pig roast, street dance, and Sunday morning church service—even if you don't live in the small town anymore. If you have a secret, it does not necessarily belong to you, or your family, or even God. It belongs to the place you are from, because eventually to resolve everything, to truly find peace, you must come to terms with the place your inner-soul calls home. In my case, this place is the North Dakota prairie.

The longer I drag my feet on this issue—my confession—the fewer people there are left in North Dakota to tell. At last count, North Dakota—well, the middle of the country for that matter—has been emptying faster than the draining of a butchered cow. A recent National Geographic issue ran an article called The Emptied Prarie which featured my home state and its painfully irreversible population decline. The pictures in the article showed abandoned farm houses in hauntingly dilapidated conditions, barren except for a few signs of life: a dusty doll, a wedding veil hanging in a bare room, an old woman looking forlorn out of a window onto the empty prarie. The pictures reminded me of villages left behind after military raids: One minute there is life and normalcy, the next stillness and emptiness.

Some attribute this loss to economics or lack of opportunity for young people. I think this emptying—at a cellular or even metaphysical level—has something to do with an even deeper issue: prairie silence. At least my emptying did.

My current life resembles something that good North Dakotans might describe as a “spinster's” life. I am a tad past thirty, very independent, the oldest in my family, not married (of course), and I live with two cats. I refuse to get three; for fear that I might graduate from spinster lady to cat lady; a far worse label.

“You met a fella yet?” The North Dakotans started asking almost ten years ago, every time I returned home to visit my family. I think they assumed I had ventured into the world to find what used to be down the gravel road, working in the neighbor's barn: a good man.

“Ah. No. Nope. No.” I'd respond in a nervous babble, trying to act normal even while my breathing changed to panic-attack shallow and I started screaming at the innocent questioner in my mind. Good Lord, do NOT go there. Please. Please talk about your crops or the latest funeral or the church turkey supper. Anything else but the fella! There was simply no way for me to tell them the truth.

And because they assumed comforting words were in order, they offered the following. “Well. This day and age? People are getting married later and later. Pretty gal like you? You'll find someone. A good one. You won't be alone for long!”

I have never been as alone as it may appear to the North Dakotans. When I first moved to the city meeting people was like watching Mom unpack ornaments for our Christmas tree. She would sink her hands deep into the plastic tub and slowly pull small figures out of crinkly tissue paper, retrieving wiry stars, handmade decorated ginger bread cookies sprayed and preserved, colorful little quilted balls, and baby Jesuses with chipped cheeks. Each ornament had its own color, texture, history, and story. Similarly in the city I met people making art, people wearing art, people with pet pigs; I witnessed lives being pulled together, lives being torn apart. I experienced, for the first time, a taste of diversity outside of the world of farmers.

I also had a very active night life, exploring the world of the gays, as we might be called on the prairie. On Saturday nights beautiful and mysterious women sauntered into bars. I watched the parade completely captivated: there were the hipsters, the academics, the granolas, and the tom boys. They were all shapes, sizes, and colors with one common trait: confidence. Where do they all come from, I wondered? Not from North Dakota, I thought.

Before moving to Minneapolis I had experienced only the Fargo Bowler, where once a month they held an underground gay dance. On those nights I scanned the crowds of flannel-clad older women, skinny gay men, and young college ravers—who were not gay, but claimed the space as an alternative stomping ground—to find someone a bit younger, a bit more like me. I had a vision, I think, of someone who looked like my childhood best friend; someone with an athletic body, feminine disposition, with a strong will, bright eyes, and dark hair. I, myself, would have probably fit in better at the sorority parties, with my lipstick, my eye liner. I had been groomed to be this—feminine, colorful, a perfect contrast for my prom dates in their black and white tuxes. I watched the women at these dances drink beer and scan the crowds. Ironically, the scene reminded me of a table filled with men at a small town cafe. I did not yet understand the subtleties of gender politics or butch fem dynamics or how later similar women would take me under their wing. At the time I simply wasn't interested in dating older women who still reminded me of a fella.

That was all over ten years ago. I now prefer evenings with a bath and a book to those out on the town. I have settled into a relationship with a woman I consider my partner. She is raising a daughter, so on evenings when her ex has her child we drink red wine, talk about life, linger in our yards or pick at our gardens. Often we make slow meals with fresh herbs, sizzling garlic, and sweet onions, mixing ingredients until the house bleeds with the delicious and complex aroma of a gourmet meal. On these nights I am not alone. I am not a spinster. Yet, this would be news back home.

***

Last year when my sister announced her wedding engagement, I requested that she substitute my Maid of Honor title with a new title of my own creation: The Best Sister. I knew I would be encountering everyone from my past at her wedding—those who have known me since I was in diapers, but who had never once asked me if I am gay. The Best Sister title was a tiny act of public rebellion on my part, as if to tell the North Dakotans that I don't believe in titles, and I will not be understood or defined by my marital status!

As we lined up to enter the church on her wedding day, sweat poured down my chest. I wasn't worried about my shoes, my dress, crying, or how my sister looked—which I think was supposed to be part of my job. Instead I was worried only about the programs, those two hundred little pieces of paper floating in the audience, now converted to fans and rolled up into little tubes, stuffed into pockets and shoved into hymnals. They know! They finally know! Then—What, actually, do they know? I asked myself, sarcastically. A response came from nowhere. That I'm different! And right then I felt liberated. My step became confident. I held my flowers tightly and proudly marched toward the altar as if I was finally going to marry my truth.

As my sister exchanged vows I decided to tune out the whole thing about women being derived from man's rib, which made me visualize human ribs coated in barbecue sauce. Instead, I practiced how I would respond when my old neighbors and teachers and pastors and high school friends make a wise crack about my Best Sister title. Yes, I decided to become a Best Sister because I will not be defined by my relationship status, I'd tell them. And while they would stand there—confused—because what I've said doesn't make a lick of sense, I would tap my chin, as if just hit with the most random thought, Say, along those lines,… for about twenty years—well, my whole life really—I have been meaning to tell you that I prefer to date women.

Good North Dakotans, if you must know, would usually make a smart comment. Best Sister, eh? What, ‘cha get a medal or something? Win some sort of award in the big city? Then they'd grab me around the shoulder, clunk my drink with their plastic beer glass, squeeze me, and say, Cheers. As if to say, Just teasing kiddo. They'd make a comment, that is, unless they didn't want to hear a response.

That night when the band started to play and the dance unfolded as most small town wedding dances will, I waited and watched. Old people sat around the parameter of the dance floor on folding chairs, drinking coffee and visiting. Little kids chased each other, screaming like baby hyenas. Women kicked off their shoes. Men loosened their ties. People pulled me out to dance and bounced me around like a tether ball. The night unfolded as planned, but nobody brought up the Best Sister. Realizing nobody was going to confront me, I took big gulps of my gin and tonic and relaxed. My shoulders fell, my chest became light; I slid across the dance floor and looped arms with family and people I've known since childhood. I welcomed, once again, the familiar and numbing comfort of our silence.

***

Two years ago Monica got a tattoo of North Dakota on her wrist. The tattoo is an outline of the state with a tiny star marking the location of Northwood, her hometown. Next she got a tattoo of the word Heartland down the middle of her arm. In ways the tattoos symbolize how clearly far she's grown from her farming roots as well as how deeply rooted she really is.

“What do you think I should tell my parents?” she asked me after her first tattoo, a star on her shoulder. In truth, I had no idea how to respond. All I could think about was Monica's mom, a Lutheran church organist for over twenty years, who put Monica into finishing school in college. At this school Monica had to learn to walk down the stairs sideways and balance books on her head. “She's teaching me how to be a fancy lady, so I know how to be with sophisticated people,” Monica would complain, though she did as she was told. How would her mom react to the tattoos, after investing so much in a vision of her daughter, a vision she hoped would help Monica grow beyond the small town and make something of herself in the larger world? I couldn't fathom.

Monica and I became friends in college during one of the worst winters in North Dakota history. It was in 1997, the year when melting snowdrifts—some crashing like waves over houses and cars—created record spring flooding in the Red River Valley. Fargo city officials ordered residents to stay inside, out of the eighty-degree below wind-chill. Anyone who disobeyed, they threatened on TV, would receive a ticket.

Knowing we would be locked in our house for days when the blizzards hit, my three roommates and I scurried to the grocery store in our parkas and our flannel pajamas to stock up on food and supplies. Monica, at first a friend of one of my roommates, drove from her tiny apartment on the other side of town, not wanting to be alone during the storm. While big flakes fell from the sky we took naps, cooked frozen pizzas, made pancakes, and flipped to the weather station to get updates between movies. The little house was barely big enough for one person, let alone five. But this was college, when a house filled with friends was more important than a house filled with space and nice furniture. We ignored time over those long days, which I now realize is a rare gift of a contented mind.

Monica was a quiet girl who wanted to be a musician and worked at the Fargo Theater, the only place in the state of North Dakota where you could catch independent films. She wore faded jeans, button-up shirts over band T-shirts, and pulled her hair up on each side of her head, clipping it with a single barrette.

On one of the blizzard nights when my roommates went to bed early, Monica changed the course of our relationship. The house was quiet. Monica and I were playing cards under the glow of red Christmas lights. She tossed me the question as freely as she tossed me a King of Spades. “Are you a heart breaker?”

As soon as the words left her lips my palms began to sweat. At that time, not even my roommates knew I was gay. We attended a private Lutheran College and they were all very good church girls who had not yet kissed a boy. I, on the other hand, had gone to prom, dated boys, and had plenty of back seat rendezvous. I was the experienced one, so my lack of boy fever was never considered all too odd.

“That's a strange question. What do you mean?” I said grabbing her king, pretending to all of a sudden be consumed with our game.

“Why is it strange? Because you are one?” Her voice was serious.

“Are one—what?”

“A heart breaker! Are you a heart breaker!” I sat up straight in my chair. The quiet girl who barely said a word when she was at our house asked this with such intensity and directness it was as if another person had just entered the room and stepped into her body. I wasn't sure where to go with her question. Besides it being rather odd, it was also as if she was accusing me of something.

“I…wouldn't…say…so, exactly.” I responded cautiously. She just stared at me. “I mean, no. No! I am not a heart breaker. Why are you asking?”

“Really? What would Samantha say?” A cold wind seemed to shake the house. Samantha was the first woman I dated at college. My relationship with her was the antithesis of what I had imagined a relationship with a woman would be. Our relationship had ended two years earlier. I certainly hadn't broken her heart. In fact, I thought she had crushed mine.

Where might this be going? I wondered. I could understand Monica fishing for a confession of my secret life, one which I had shared with only a handful of new friends. But Monica's accusations seemed to be less about me being gay than me being a heart breaker. I didn't understand.

“Frankly, I don't care what Samantha says.” Another card. “So, you obviously must know her?”

“Yes. She knows my roommate, Laura.”

“Oh. So, you must know a lot about me then.” I said, my heart pounding now. I was unpracticed, still frozen when it came to talking about my desire to be in a relationship with a woman. I tried to act calm, as if I had been through this discussion a hundred times. “Did Samantha say I am a heart breaker or something?”

Monica didn't respond. Instead she got up and went to the couch where she sat, pulled her knees close to her chest, and rocked back in forth. Her face turned white. I followed her. I was confused, scared, and curious. I was the one who was now exposed. I was the one with the secret! Why was she shaking like hurt small animal?

“Are you okay?” I asked. Then they came. Words flowed from her body like lava that had been waiting a thousand years to touch the air. She was shaking, spilling stories of a long-time love affair with her female basketball coach from high school. The woman, now a coach at a neighboring college, had ended their several-year-long relationship to date another girl.

Monica's interrogation was not about me, it was about her. Her angry accusation quickly fizzled as her more authentic need emerged: the need to share her story before she bled to death internally. Like me, she kept her feelings a secret, one she did not share with another living soul, not her family, not her friends, not her small town. Her fear forced her to deal with the most dramatic and painful experience of her life—the death of a first love—in complete silence. I had done the same, years earlier. Monica had decided that the demise of her pure love could only be explained by thinking of her ex-love as someone she didn't really know, someone capable of being a Heart Breaker.

On that blizzard night we talked until dawn, putting words to years of silence, like finally putting words to a score of music. And over the next year, our senior year, Monica became my closest friend. She ventured with me to the Fargo Bowler where we danced into the night with women and men who came from nowhere and disappeared into that nowhere when the night ended. Convinced we were the only lesbians in the world under sixty, we promised each other that we would move after graduation.

Monica moved to San Francisco, dyed her hair, learned how to DJ, started a band, and joined the hipster counter-culture queers in the Mission. Her San Francisco friends are not from San Francisco. They have all drifted there, restless souls like Monica, looking to the city to free them, to fulfill them, to inspire and deliver them to a paradise of like-minded people.

I moved to Minneapolis, focused on my career, bought a house, started graduate school and befriended women who spent more in one evening on dinner than the free-spirits in Monica's San Francisco made in one week. Monica and I took different paths, but are still connected by our beginning, a beginning we both still crave.

In a recent North Dakota election there was a measure on the ballet proposing that anyone under thirty who lived and worked in the state would receive a thousand dollars a year to pay off their student loan debt. The measure failed.

Some living in the state are trying to put a tourniquet on the gaping wound through which many educated and ambitious young people leave. The state is desperate for revival. And even though the National Geographic article generated letters from the angry North Dakotans, wanting to defend the viability and fruitfulness of the state, I doubt the most optimistic North Dakotan could ever imagine a restoration of rural America, of towns with populations ranging from thirty to two-thousand. The small town, it seems, is dying into extinction.

Over the years I have learned that the one personal disclaimer that will cause pause—when I am on a business trip to New York for example—is not about dating women. The eyebrow raiser is this: “I'm originally from North Dakota.”

“North Dakota?” My new acquaintances always repeat my statement in the form of a question, as if I must have been mistaken.

“North Dakota.” I will say with a shrug.

“Wow!” They tilt their heads. “Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

At this point they'll get a smug grin. “Now, tell me. What in the world is North Dakota like?” as if I am about to deliver the punch line.

This is a difficult question for me to answer. Somehow, I want to explain to them that the land is beautiful, beyond their imagination. But I am stopped, like when I bring my city friends back to the farm. When the houses thin and we are eventually surrounded by nothingness I suddenly lose my vision. The world looks bleak, flat, unpromising and colorless. I start apologizing as if I had dragged them to an empty art gallery. “The view is kind of the ugly time of year,” I'll say.

Yet when I return to the farm on my own, and am not responsible for another person's eyes, the land speaks to me in another way. Rediscovering the landscape of North Dakota is like finding a familiar childhood book with soft pages that smell sweet with age. The flat land is not dry, not dark, not lifeless. Instead North Dakota is a painter's pallet where all of the earthly colors settle. The light changes minute by minute, following unassuming subjects: a wheat field, a gravel road, a gray grain elevator. When I squint I can almost see the bottom of Glacial Lake Agassiz, the ancient lake that left the Red River Valley fertile and flat. The rows in the fields are the sand ripples of the lake bottom. The shelterbelts are large alien sea plants, reaching to the light. The sky is the surface of the lake reflecting the sun.

“North Dakota is actually very beautiful,” is all I will say to my new acquaintances. They'll look at me with a suspicious eye, as if to say, “What could emptiness possibly hold?”

Over the years, I came home to find that not only had businesses closed, but they were actually gone. Completely vanished. Today, my home town's main street resembles the mouth of an old woman who is missing most of her teeth. A few brick buildings still stand, surrounded by spaces that will never be filled.

I cannot say why, exactly, it matters that these buildings are gone. Though I think it has something to do with driving through any part of the country and being solicited by the same chain stores with the same brands with the same colors and the same goods, whether you are in Arizona or Minnesota. The only difference in some of these places is the natural world, the lakes and the cacti, reminding us of contrast, of hot and cold, of mountains and valleys. I frequent the assimilated superstores; they have trained me to know their aisles, to be thankful that in a hurried stop that I can retrieve Glad trash bags or Tide by walking straight for four aisles and turning left, whether I am in Utah or Ohio.

Or maybe it matters that these businesses are gone because of the people, something to do with visions of my parents' friends, business owners and farmers, who took jobs in larger towns pushing papers and drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups, making small talk with co-workers and answering to a boss in a stale, florescent-lit office. 

As I ponder those of us who have left the prairie, I wonder what stories we take with us and what longer stories we end. There are, of course, those few kids who don't end up leaving the prairie. They are the ones who take over family businesses or marry their high school sweethearts. These people become the material of the next generation, the thin fabric that keeps the community connected and viable. Of those who do leave, I think there are two manifestations of the departed. First, there are the few who leave early and permanently. They escape into the larger world and truly disappear; their face is forever frozen on the walls of the high school in their senior picture. Then there are the rest of us. The in-betweens. We leave, but we never truly leave. Our families are connectedto the community like trees to the earth. We are bound to this place we still call home, to people we call neighbors and friends. But some of us must keep the familiar at arms length because of prairie silence.

Prairie silence is—I have come to believe—the way the people of the prairie mirror the land with their sturdy, hard working, fruitful, and quiet dispositions. They are committed to each other like the soil is committed to the crop. They are uncomplaining, in the way the land dutifully recovers after blizzards, droughts, and floods destroy. They are humble and quiet, like white prairie grass in the wind. They swallow their problems, their fears, their shames, and their secrets—figuring that nature will take care of everything, somehow or other. That is, after all, how it works with the crops. And once a silence has taken hold, whatever it is, it is hard to uproot.

***

I haven't always been fond of the farm. As a child I made a stink about living in the middle of nowhere. I made sure Mom knew how unfair it was that the town kids had to ride their bikes only a few blocks to see friends. I had to ride mine at least three miles.

“Honey, believe me, you wouldn't like to live in town. All those people…” my mom would say. She was the authority, the only one in my family who had ever lived in a town, having grown up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. “Plus, you can play with the Holtz anytime you like.”

The Holtz kids lived three miles down the gravel road, a good bike ride away, and could have very well lived in the trees. They were stocky and strong, three boys and a girl, with deep-gravely laughs, freckles, dark hair, and eyes lit with a sort of devious wild-joy. At their farm my brother and I spent hours riding in creaky wagons connected to lawn mowers engines the Holtzs had turned into small vehicles. The Holtzs were like pirates on the sea, piled up on their small tractor, headbands and dirty faces, looking into the horizon, and pulling us down well-worn paths they carved into the shelter belts by their farm.

The Holtz kids were earth kids. They belonged in the trees. In another time and place, they would have settled on the land—I am quite sure—connected by a deep and long tradition, by a pulse running through their blood. Yet their parents had to move off of the farm before the oldest of the Holtzs was old enough to go to high school. My brother and I were devastated to lose our dirty-faced friends; the only friends we could visit without having to get into a car. Today all of the Holtz kids live in towns far away from their small farm; far from the abandoned paths they carved into the trees such a long time ago.

Sometimes I wonder if I will be the last generation of my family to live on the land, to know the land. Or sometimes I wonder if am the first generation of a larger kind: The first generation of people to leave the land, the small towns, the Lutheran churches, where they still make coffee by cracking eggs into the grounds, behind. The first generation to realize that the world of rural America—both the good and the bad of it—will never again be as it once was. The first generation to look back and say, with sadness, I cannot return.

Is silence, my silence, this powerful? Maybe.