When I told everyone out East that we were moving to Kansas, their reactions ranged from disbelief to curiosity to confusion to shock. I might as well have said I was moving to Siberia. The reaction would have been about the same.  As I watched the expressions of my friends and colleagues, I could imagine them trying to grasp this news, to make sense of it.  Kansas … hmmm … large place … bleak … far away … empty … flat … unknown …why … why would she do this …Wizard of Oz … confusion … exile … fly over country … cannot compute … can’t figure out what to say.  Really, you could read it all on their faces.

What they usually said was something like, "Oh wow, that’s so far away" (implication - Are you crazy?) or "I hear it’s really flat" or, more directly, "Why Kansas?" or "Say hello to Dorothy" (this witticism would have grown old except for the fact that The Wizard of Oz is one of my favorite movies, and as I’ve lived in Kansas, I find that that wonderful movie does capture so much that is … Kansas. More on that later.

So I added to my standard reply. “I WANT to move to Kansas. Really!” That this was a good thing. I found myself reassuring them that I was going to be OK in what they considered to be distant frontier, far removed from civilization (read “the East”). So I’d go on: “We love the prairie, my husband and I. We are Midwesterners, remember? My mother’s family were all from Kansas. My mother grew up in Abilene, my grandmother in Lyons. I grew up in St. Louis. We have bought a farm.” And finally, with emphasis: “We LIKE to live in the country.” Slightly encouraged by this information, they’d look at me less dubiously, beginning to understand that someone might actually, truly want to live somewhere other than the East, somewhere else than a city or near a city, somewhere out there.

And here we are, where we want to be: in Kansas. In Osage County, Kansas. And I want to write about this first year out here on our 120-acre farm, to trace the seasons, the history, the prairie, the wildflowers, the gardens, the animals, the people. Kansas is a magical place and well worth close attention. And when I find Dorothy, I’ll let you know.