Siouxland Revisited again

 

It  happens to have been one of my all-time favorite places to visit even though, if I'd take you there, you would likely say there's nothing there. You'd be right, but something in the angle of the land right here captures at least something of its spaciousness, and while there are no landmarks anywhere near, somehow, just an average day in the sky east can transform anything into beauty. 

Same tree, same place, just a few minutes later: same result--something beautiful, just a lighter shade of pale.

Once, of course, there was a tree here, but a succession of prairie winds took it down, slowly, I'd imagine, branch by branch, so that given the early morning sun's drama, it becomes a cemetery stone, a marker that reminds me, at least, that when white folks came to this land and determined where there'd be a town named Orange City, one of those first settlers claimed that when he'd just stand there on his plot, his own chunk of haloed ground, he could look over the earth before him and around him and see only one blessed tree. 

This one is shot looking west,  catching the early morning sun.

If you've never lived or visited here, on a good bright day, this is what the land looks like--well, maybe even less festooned since just about every farmer these days rolls his refuse into huge bales and uses those rolls for food and bedding. But this is the kind of bare nakedness that's blindingly obvious wherever you look.

And then, the dawn well passed, the sky became a character--all the same place, all the same  morning.

This one has been published and printed time and time again. It's the composition that lives here--the mess of wire against an orange dawn. I took the picture, but I certainly didn't create the image.

One more.

Look, if I'd taken only this frame, I would have considered myself blessed. This is a Siouxland print. Two days ago it showed up here. Here it is again, just in case you missed it.

They  are all of a November morning, 2007, just eighteen years ago, maybe eight miles west of Sioux Center just off Dogwood Ave.