"Kansas is where I was born and raised.
Contrary to the picture you probably have in your head right now, I was not
raised on a dry age-old farm with a tornado looming in the background. (oh,
don’t even bother trying to deny it! As soon as I said Kansas you were picturing Dorothy and Toto!)
I was, however, raised in a little piece
of God’s country that is called the Flinthills. It’s the part of Kansas that
isn’t flat, but where the hills trip and roll over on top of one another in
these endless waves of green and umber grass. All this under a sun filled sky
and a raging prairie wind that will leave you breathless. Paint in a stratosphere
so blue and expansive you would swear it’s been transferred from a canvas and
you pretty much have it. Open and untamed it stretches its arms to the horizon
like a lazy kid on a Saturday morning. It’s beautiful and earthy, that kind of
earthy that seeps into your soul without you really knowing it, and makes you a
girl born for wide open spaces.
My town (and I call it my town because
I’ve lived there since I was born) is nestled between these rolling hills in a
large tree filled valley at the convergence of the Big Blue River and Tuttle
Creek. My town is that perfect combination of booming small town and laid-back
city. The entire town is actually a combination of a few smaller towns that
originally sprung up after a riverboat crashed on a sandbar coming down the river.
The founders figured that here was as good a place as any to start their new
pioneer communities.
In time the three smaller towns joined up
and bloomed around a state land grant agriculture college that was started
there. To this day the entire town still revolves to some extent around the
goings-on of the now multi-faceted university. We are a college town, which no
one seems to mind much, as you can clearly see when you drive down the street.
You’ll be audience to team spirit in the form of flags, car license plates, t-shirts,
and even a lawn sculpture or two which proudly display the university team
emblem.
There are a few other attractions to the
town like the large dammed lake which hosts fishing, boating, and a country
music festival every summer when temperatures reach record highs. There are
college football games at the giant stadium, where the cheers reach deafening
levels that can be heard for miles, and traffic backs up for ages for
tailgating. There is the shopping/eating/bar district that tends to attract all
kinds of different colorful characters from miles around for the coffee shops,
food, and boutiques during the day, and the beer and hard liquor at night. Of
course we have our county fair and rodeos too.
The main bulk of the town is sandwiched
between a hill proudly bearing our town name and another displaying the letters
“KS” in letters 20 feet high.
It’s not uncommon to see camouflage around
town both from the rural/hunting contingency and from the army base a few miles
away. Bicycles furiously pedaling down the streets are a normal sighting thanks
to all the low income students flooding town with their energy conscious
hipster trends. When new businesses come to town everyone gets excited to try
them out, even though they are the same as the chain the next town over. The
town lets out its belt and gets a little bigger, they expand such-and-such
street to double lanes, but for the most part things go on about the same every
year in my town.
In the midst of this is where I grew up.
When I was little we lived quite close to campus. So close in fact that we were
regularly woken up at night by rambunctious yelling and a drunken personage or
two. In grade school, my sister and I actually swore that we would never go to
college because we seriously thought that all
college students were crazy like that!"
