Friday: Omaha, Nebraska

I woke this morning in Denver, Co expecting to be sleeping in my house tonight. We decided to stop early and spend the night in Omaha. My mother and her family all hail from the Omaha area and I feel a special kinship with this area. It’s like somewhere in my DNA I'm supposed to be connected to the land here. A few years ago, on a different vacation, we stopped by the little town in North (South?) Dakota were Laura Ingalls Wilder was raised. We saw the little schoolhouse (which is smaller than my tiny RV) where she taught and saw the trees planted by Pa Ingalls himself. We drove through miles and miles of corn to get there and slept in a campground surrounded by green stalks. The heat of the Midwest is swealtering in the summer and when afternoon finally yields to evening you can still feel the hot lurking in the cool breeze. So that evening Chris and I attended a play put on by the local community for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Festival that happened to be going on. We drove to the makeshift theater which was in the middle of the corn field that Pa Ingalls used to plow. There were booths selling cotton candy, roasted corn, and other summer treats. We rode a horse drawn wagon to our spot on the ground where we slapped huge mosquitoes as the sun set and the play began. We sat next to a couple from the northeast and together we were enchanted by the simplicity and profoundness of the play. I felt then the tugging of my Midwest DNA- earthy, rugged, hard working and joyful. When we stopped here today I was hoping to make a similar connection. It is a bit hard because in the cornfields sits an Outlet Mall with a Baby Gap, Bed Bath and Beyond and McDonalds. The homogenization of America is sucking away our simple beauty.