It’s July 1st, so I’ve been back in the Midwest for, what, three months? A quarter of a year.

After fits and starts, travel and more travel and D gone for half of each month, we are beginning to own our home, home-ownership and the giant yard that always needs tending.  While D mows, I trim the plethora of plants we inherited and attack the weeds which threaten to take over after every rain.  While he puts food on the grill, I sort through the piles of mail addressed to Our New Neighbor or Bamani Venkat (my new name, which I am sure is a result of the following thought process over at Ohio Snail Mail Spam Central: “Maitri Venkat-R … what? Aaaah, new name! *FREAKOUT* Damned furners. *FREAKOUT* I don’t know what to do! Let’s just put it down as Bamani Venkat. Next!“  I am told not to complain as this is a great way to cull the junk mail.)

I had forgotten how beautiful the midwestern countryside is.  From atop a western hill, we often lose hours staring at the fields between our house and the county to the south, and the sun setting behind a limestone cliff.  Or a wild turkey or ten and deer that invariably spring forth from the same spot in the woods to the southwest. D watches them without a single movement, like an Ent or a patient predator, while the city girl in me moves and tries to get as close as possible without scaring off the critters.  I scare off the critters.  Apparently, they have great eyesight and like neither bright colors nor sudden movements.

Summertime, and the sun takes forever to wane in these northern latitudes.  At 10pm last night, patches of fuchsia and imperial violet sky peeked out from breaks in the trees and rocks.  Breathtaking.  And that’s when the fireflies and stars come out.  As the sun sets, they rise higher and higher, until you cannot tell where the fireflies in the tall trees end and the stars in the sky begin.  The stars.  Oh, the stars.  You can see every last one of them lying in the soft grass.  The Big Dipper, Draco, Cassiopeia, the rest of the northern sky, they’re all there.  I asked D if this is what it was like for him growing up in the Wisconsin back 40.  He nodded.  Wow.  I grew up in the Kuwaiti desert, where few ventured out at night and the twinkling red lights over the city’s skyscrapers were all the stars you needed.  Besides, living in the midst of the merciless urbanization of a coastal desert environment, the only animals we got to see were jack, squat and the occasional feral cat rummaging through the garbage.  Now you know why I want to say “Yeah, and one day we put dear old Humpy down and ate him with buns and ketchup” each time someone asks me whether I grew up with a camel in my backyard.

Might I have been a different person raised in a country house surrounded by trees, fresh air and animals?  Who knows?  Was I envious of kids raised here?  Possibly.  I remember midwestern farm kids, though, who wanted to trade places with me, bored of shucking corn, scrubbing the horses and other endless chores.  I may not consider a city, be it Kuwait City or New York City, an ideal place to raise a kid, but people live every which way and that is how it is, equally legitimate.  The way to go then is to enjoy our geographic variety as a species and live alongside, with respect to.  When I once asked my Barcelona-dwelling friend Annie if she would ever move back to northern Wisconsin, she replied, “It’s not a great place to be, but a wonderful place to be from.”

Read the rest of this entry »