Enough rain fell this spring to green the grass through the first half of summer. The young lambs and calves frolicked while the mamas happily grazed. People harvested their first crop of hay.
“We are about one day away from drought though,” my husband kept saying. But then we’d get a small shower. The grass kept growing. It wasn’t a great year, but it was good enough.
The second half of the summer was much hotter. It stopped raining. August came to a close, and we were all longing for fall and cooler temperatures, but it stayed hot and then got hotter, and there wasn’t a drop of precipitation.
The fields, cured to gold, began to look more arid than I’ve ever seen them, and the swirling dust that appeared whenever the wind came up (which was often) left everything with a thick coating of brown dirt.
When my son was an infant, I took him to Boston to meet my best friend. We’d arrived at the end of October, and the brilliance of the foliage is still vivid in my memory. Perhaps it was because I’d been living and working on the short grass prairie for five years by then, so I’d forgotten what a tree-filled autumn is like. But I remember walking the cobblestone streets by her house and almost swooning, breathless at the wonder of those reds and oranges and bright, bright yellows.
Every October since, I’ve felt a melancholy regret that I don’t live surrounded by that kind of autumn splendor, and this year, with the monochromatic landscape of brown, the melancholy was stronger than usual.
Luckily, an opportunity to travel in October with my kids to the Driftless Region (an unglaciated section of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa) presented itself, and I was thrilled because I was sure it would rival that long ago trip to Massachusetts for autumn color. The reality was a little anticlimactic.
Turns out, Minnesota has also been in a drought. There was certainly more color variety than we experience here on the ranch, but no one was swooning.
The trip was still a delight, however. I played two shows, saw friends and family, visited a sheep farm nestled in a cozy valley and met an artisan cheesemaker. We got to crunch through piles of crisp leaves, (“This is so satisfying!” my son said) collect acorn caps and fill a little paper bag with some (slightly faded) orange and red maple leaves to bring home and show school friends.
We left Minneapolis to fly back to South Dakota early in the morning. The sky was cloudy, and as we crossed the bridge over the Mississippi River, I looked down at the bluffs and marveled. Something about the pearly, gray light reflecting off the water illuminated the branches of the trees, the colors finally shimmering brightly.
“Look!” I said to the kids, but they were talking about buildings and interstate traffic and wondering about the snacks on the plane. They glanced out of the backseat windows and then returned to their conversation.
We landed in Rapid City a few hours later. The Rapid City airport was built on a hill, and when you step out, you can see golden prairie and mountains set against the wide sky for what looks like a hundred miles on every side. It was still morning, and the air was soft and warm.
“Ah!” My daughter said, breathless with wonder for the first time since we’d left five days before. “It’s SO good to be home.” I looked around and I saw what she was seeing.
It wasn’t the autumn splendor that I’d grown up with, the kind captured in pumpkin spice latte commercials, but it was splendor nonetheless.
So what’s the point of all this? Certainly that longing for something else can cause you to miss what you already have. Or that there are lots of kinds of beauty.
Or, as I told my daughter, one of the joys of traveling is the joy of coming home. Or maybe there’s no point at all because it’s October and that’s good enough.
