Highland, July 2013

There are a ton of these shots in my bank of old pics--a stratified prairie sky showing off its fanciest colors out east , a stage for awaiting the soon-to-arrive dawn. Sometimes you find treasures at places you could not have imagined. One has to learn to allow the scene to do its own work.

Long ago I stumbled on this chunk of ground without knowing a thing--or even imagining--the treasures it held. That weather-beaten tree stands, mostly alone, against untold acres of wide-brimmed farmland. Once there was a town here, but all that is left these days is a cemetery of only a few stones, an immigrant Norwegian-American cemetery (the names notably not Dutch). Those who might remember the place--it was determined to live here in this new country--have long ago departed.

Should you  spot this from the blacktop, you would see nothing particular; but out there in the middle of the section there's just something about the place that calls me back again and again because a constellation of its ordinary images make the place a scene that almost always delivers (not simply because it is a cemetery!)

Those faraway lights are Sioux Center's. 

Lebanon/Highland captured my attention for years. These shots were a visit on June 16, 2013, just a year after I retired from a lifetime of teaching.