Intro...

This is a section of an intro I wrote for my book...

"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!"