The Final Solution

 

It's a kind of anxiety, I suppose, something akin to unease. What is visible on the faces of these mothers and children is their troubledness, not because they fear death but because they have no idea of they ma well be on their way. They have no sense at all of what will happen. Even the faces of the children register how uneasy they are, how scared. Perhaps it's better that they didn't know.

On the far side is an imperial proclamation signed by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I in 1551 that ordered all Jewish people to wear a circle on their clothing. The document on the left indicates that the document on the right was a gift to Hermann Goring, who with Reinhard Heydrich had come up with the idea of requiring all the Jews in Germany and throughout occupied Europe to wear stars on their clothing, so there could be no mistaking the truth. There was, after all, precedent, historical precedent.

If you need a story to go with the plan, you make one up or refashion it from fear that's already in the air, a story that takes advantage of a man or woman's sense of victimhood or powerlessness or lack of achievement, a story that will, at once, locate an enemy and an answer to why on earth your not getting what you deserve. For some, that story began here in a Jewish cemetery in Poland where Jewish people entered late in the night to make final plans on taking over the world. 

Imagine this. You spot this post card for sale somewhere on the street and tell yourself you really should say hello to cousin Egbert. The action of the drawing tells all, but the visage of the Jewish cross-dresser manages to convey in a single, grotesque image the total ugliness of the enemy, his (or her) danger to German patriots, his overwhelming power (look at that arm) and the malignant sexuality of, you know, those inferior beings. "Greetings," the writer might say on the other side.  

Here's the sign my Dutch cousins would have seen, a proclamation from the occupying Nazi forces making clear to the nation's Jewish citizenry that the law going presently into effect mandates their wearing a yellow star. And from the yellow star, the Nazis moved to this

and this

and this

Not so long ago. Not so far away.

Not so long ago. Not so far away.

Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, got to thinking that Theodor Eicke, at a place called Dachau, had a stroke of genius when he decided that his camp should erect a welcome sign, Arbeit Macht Frei, which means something to the effect of "work sets you free," and might have been a half-truth that Dachau, but was never anywhere close to the truth at Auschwitz, a factory, stunningly, designed from the very first stroke of a pencil, to house an industry whose sole purpose was extermination of human beings, as if they were lice.

Why not a lie? Men and women, strong and weak, Jews and Gentiles didn't leave Auschwitz. They were gassed burned. 

You want to know how people left Auschwitz?--have a look at this drawing created by an inmate. People left Auschwitz in a column of smoke from the specially designed crematoriums, where bodies were incinerated dozens at a time. The genius of the Auschwitz method was that both the killing and the incineration were handily arranged for peak efficiency. 

Perfectly evil. 

In truth, the exhibition at Union Station in Kansas City was remarkably. You might think it impossible to overdramatize what happened at Auschwitz, but if the story was told with nothing huge photographs of naked human beings--some dead, some half-dead, and some still alive--the effect of the story would be different. We've all seen them--boxcars spilling emaciated bodies lying atop each other like cord wood. There was very little of that, which meant that throughout the museum of artifacts, photographs, videos and striking quotes (like the one above), your brain could remain engaged because your sensitivities weren't burned. 

The exhibition's subtitle carried the vital theme: "Not long ago. Not far away."

To me, among the most horrifying pictures was this one:

Every eye awaits his his every facial expression, every ear his every word. The crowd of cultists cannot get enough. Hitler, they once thought, was the Savior of the Reich, the Third Reich. He promised to take them to a station in the world Germany deserved to be. After the desolation of the First World War, the legacy of defeat, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, the subjection of a once proud and powerful empire, he--Adolph Hitler--would make Germany great again. 

Last weekend, the Republican National Committee met to determine its direction, and then took one. They tossed out the two members of their party who had determined to work with the January 6 committee, and then passed a resolution that called what happened in the nation's capital "legitimate political discourse."

Legitimate political discourse.

It's impossible not to draw parallels. The riot--the insurrection--that occurred that January day now more than a year ago, to his supporters, can not be in any way attributable to Donald Trump. If you take those Nazi armbands out of the picture and superimpose the head of a man with orange hair on the man with a moustache, the picture will look a lot like the kind of rally the man with orange hair feeds on.

For me at least, the most chilling chapter of "Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not Far Away," was not the crematorium, the crowds of hairless women, not even this, a onesie from a child who, like so many others, was gassed and incinerated.

The most horrifying of the pictures were these:

intelligent, educated, thoughtful men, oohing and aahing over plans for an impressive and efficient place to kill millions of human beings; and this

German people having fun while whole families burned.

They were lied to, but their guilt lies in having accepted the lie. Their guilt lies in these artifacts:

A peephole from a crematorium, a door behind which the fires raged, and a pole, just a tool.  This is Hannah Arendt.

Not so long ago. Not so far away.

Perfectly awful

I'd like to think that just about everyone has read the stories--and seen the pictures. They're perfectly awful, of course, but just about any description falls short--say, f0r instance, the line I just used. Listen: "pictures of the Holocaust--we've all seen them--are perfectly awful.

There's even a hint of an oxymoron there, two words most often and most likely thought of as opposites: perfect and awful. The oxymoron stretches the description into something almost poetic, something more than words--in this case--something worse than the words. It takes something more than words to describe the Holocaust. If, in point of fact, a picture is worth a thousand words, it's safe to say, I believe, that even pictures of the suffering are perfectly awful. What happened in the camps was worse--always, always, always worse.

Here's a picture of words scribbled down by a Jewish man from Poland named Zalman Grodowski, who was specially chosen as a sonderkommando, a man designated, under penalty of death, to help take people to their deaths.



No matter what you say or how you say it, it's just not enough. For the last several months, Union Station, Kansas City, has hosted an exhibition of Auschwitz artifacts that curators have assembled into a comprehensive retelling of the story of Auschwitz, perhaps the most famous of the camps because it was, almost from its inception, an factory designed for one purpose and one purpose only--to kill millions of undesirables. These men, these women, these children--


and this,



women like these, who've already lost their hair--



Death itself dreamed up in a place that would seem a wonderful historical building even if it hadn't hosted the ordinary men who sat down together and designed a place of death, a "death camp" that would kill a million people,



where men who worshipped at Christian churches--Protestant and Catholic, men who listened to Bach and Brahms and Beethoven and loved their wives and children, men who waved their national flag and were more than willing to give up their lives for Deutschland, where those men sat down together over coffee and looked over plans like this, drawn up by ordinary architects and draftsman in ironed shirts and pleated pants, other men who, after work, went home and enjoyed family dinners--



Men and women whose life's mission was described and defined by a man they worshipped, a hero, one of their own who cared about their troubles, their lives, and their souls, and showed them the way to the immensity of the task they faced: 



Just in case you can't read the quote, let me make it perfectly clear, as clear as it was to the millions of Germans who determined it to be the truth:

Here in the East spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: German sense of honor and race, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts. We clearly recognize our mission to save European culture from the advancing Asiatic barbarism. This battle can only end with the destruction of one or the other.

Perfectly awful. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Groaning

“I remembered you, O God, and I groaned;

I mused, and my spirit grew faint.” Psalm 77:3

There are times in church when I nearly lose my wife. Maybe I should say she nearly loses herself. Maybe we attend too often—twice every Sunday. Maybe we’ve attended for too long—both of us, entire lifetimes. Maybe it’s the specific congregation—a wonderful place full of many, many happy faces. I don’t know the reasons, but yesterday in church—both times—I nearly lost her. She doesn’t sing, doesn’t read along, doesn’t appear to be in it whatsoever. What she does there is not worship, really. At the end of the sermon last night, she was looking down at her hands and had been for a long, long time.

She is my wife, and I believe I understand her, although with each passing year I’m less sure of our being able to enter the corners of any of our individual secret places. But I have this advantage: she is my wife, and I know something of what she is feeling because I too experience what it is that weighs upon her.

This entire weekend has been another one of those that both of us hope never, ever to experience again. “No young man thinks he shall ever die,” Hazlitt once wrote, one of my all-time favorite aphorisms. But neither does any young man ever believe he will become the father of adult children. Trying to make it through your child’s suffering—your adult child’s suffering—is nothing you can prepare for. It’s a black hole that threatens to engorge everything.

I think it is the lot of parents to worry even more than their children, even when children create the worry—and even when the children themselves do worry. I don’t live in my kids’ skin. I don’t know what they’re feeling from moment to moment; what I’m left with is the deadly sting of those few moments when I do know, moments when what I see is poison. They may well go back to home, turn on some music or watch a flick, and walk right out of the darkness I’ve just experienced with them.

Not so, us. We spend the rest of the weekend in a midnight winter.

Our kids’ problems inflict wounds whose bleeding doesn’t stanch easily because the older one becomes, the fewer coagulants one’s insides seem to produce. Blood spatters all over, on everything. It smears the walls in the living room and pools in the bedroom. And when we go to church, we track it right into the pew.

And that’s why I say that yesterday in church I almost lost my wife.

Honestly, I know of no better way to understand what Asaph is talking about here in Psalm 57. In the night, with his hands extended, he hoped and prayed for blessing that flat out didn’t come. What he remembers is the very language of his groaning. Because he knows oodles of blessings, in their absence, when all the world seems aligned against him, those bountiful memories trigger spiritual, mental, and even physical pain that is excruciating.

Sometimes our cries and prayers seem as bootless as Asaph’s, and that realization—that God seems stone deaf—is the peculiar pain only of those who know Him. When our Lord God doesn’t pick up the phone, believers feel unspeakably alone, even in worship, maybe most alarmingly then.

“I remembered you, O God, and I groaned.”

Been there, done that.

"You Are Happy"

This poem showed up on my screen a week or so ago, courtesy of Writers' Almanac. It brought to mind the forty-year-old essay that appeared here for the last two days. Margaret Atwood, a Canadian novelist (and, I guess, poet) is on a different beach--all stones, no sand--but it's the same winter environment. Have a good look at what she sees. Read the poem slowly and you won't be surprised at all surprised by the title--or the last line.

 You Are Happy

by Margaret Atwood

The water turns

a long way down over the raw stone,

ice crusts around it

We walk separately

along the hill to the open

beach, unused

picnic tables, wind

shoving the brown waves, erosion, gravel

rasping on gravel.

In the ditch a deer

carcass, no head. Bird

running across the glaring

road against the low pink sun.

When you are this

cold you can think about

nothing but the cold, the images

hitting into your eyes

like needles, crystals, you are happy.

Seagulls and Sovereignty - ii

 

In winter the beach is desolate from the sharp grass of the sand cliffs to the hem of ice chunks the lake wears until March. The sand runs smooth and true as plate glass, and the tiny footsteps my children make seem remarkable, the paths they form, poetic. In the winter the beach belongs to the wind, of course, uncovering stones as round and flat as silver dollars, rolling the soft sand in flowing drifts-"frolic architecture" Emerson called it-in elegance unmatched by anything manmade. Just the seagulls are here now-and the deer. My daughter puts two little fingers in the cloven prints they leave behind.

Just being here makes me confess hypocrisy, as if my real purpose in coming here were my children's benefit. Lake Michigan, this magnificent presence, still attracts me, still leaves me in awe, too full of the touch of its presence to explain it clearly. So while my kids write their names in the sand with the tail feather of a seagull, I let it work its mystery on me in its own inimitable, silent way, the way it always has.

It tells me things I've always known but never really taken the time to believe. Its incredible size mocks my own smallness. Its eternal rhythm reveals the transience of my own life and mocks my ambition. Filling the entire eastern horizon, its immense presence portrays what Thoreau called the "quiet desperation" of my daily living.

And yet, paradoxically, it strengthens me amid all this humiliation. I am reminded, Calvinist that I am, of the in­terdependence of the sand and the water and the gull and the deer and the sky; and within it all, my self, man, God's final creation during that first incredible week, this lake, somehow, still remembers. My children's meandering paths only emphasize the lesson, because they fit in too. I don't remember it, but there must have been a time when I, like my children, looked at all of this as just the world's greatest sandbox.

We all need our Lake Michigans. Novelist John Fowles says he feels it most in the forest, this inescapable sense of having to measure oneself and one's ambitions in the face of the eternal. I was brought up on the lake; I feel it here. When I see my father-in-law's eyes sweep up over 40 acres of soybeans and scan the horizon of Iowa farmland, I know he feels it too.

My daughter says her hands are cold, so we head back to the car. It is time, I suppose. That's when I soften enough to forgive those first Calvinist settlers who knew that the beach could grow no corn, who left the beautiful shoreline to today's "beautiful people." I can forgive because I learned from them another of those fretful paradoxes of faith: having been awed by His presence, He tells me to go back now, to leave, to return to the world of quiet desperation. It’s a command. It’s not a request. Eventually it gets hard to breathe on a mountaintop. The beach, no matter how beautiful, is as sandy as a desert. Such is the nature of retreat. It is done only in order to return uplifted, strengthened, more sure, perhaps, of who we are, what we are about, but never as an end in itself, no matter how ravishing.

Out here, facing the vast horizon of perfect blues, its strain of sky and water barely visible, I find it easy to sing, “This is my father’s world.” Back at the office, five floors up overlooking a skyline of a million people, it’s not as easy, even though it’s just as true. Having been here, I know it once more.

After the car warms, my daughter asks if we can come back again sometime.

Seagulls and Sovereignty - i

"Seagulls and Sovereignity" is 40 years old, written when we lived in Oostburg, Wisconsin, while I was in graduate school and Barbara was working in the bank just down the block from the house, uptown, where we lived for a couple of years. My off days were her work days, which meant I was the mom to our two kids, neither of them quite yet in school. So I took them out to the lakeshore, even in the cold of winter. This little essay appeared first in the Sunday magazine of the Milwaukee Journal all those years ago. I've been working on a memoir that uses published things to trace my life (and ours). Running this one here gives me a chance to put up Lake Michigan pictures.

~*~*~*~*~

I didn't grow up on Lake Michigan, literally. My ethnic ancestors first set claims on the Lake Michigan shoreline, and they called their first American town their own "Amsterdam," hoping, perhaps, that the name would pro­vide some clear identity and maybe a touch of security in the new country. Today there is no Amsterdam, Wiscon­sin--no town, no streets, no church. When the railroads came twenty years after its founding, my ancestors' oxen lugged Amsterdam up and away from the shoreline on long tamarack boughs, setting it carefully down a mile away, close to the new shiny rails, sure that growth was in­evitable over there, adjacent to the freshly cut path of the great steam locomotive.

They were right, of course. So today, 125 years later, the shoreline belongs to people who have made their for­tunes in Milwaukee or Chicago, people whose names once seemed foreign to the Veldbooms, the Wilterdinks, and the Eernisses, the later generations of the first settlers. In 1850, the first Dutch immigrants knew nothing at all about the real estate market, so they turned their backs on the shoreline, moving west into soggy Wisconsin marshlands, where they put to use their old-country propensity for til­ing and draining the swamps and turning it all into produc­tive farmland.

So when I say I grew up on Lake Michigan, I mean I grew up close enough to hear its continuous roar through my open bedroom window, close enough to ride my 26 inch J.C. Higgins down to the beach and go skinny-dipping, one fairly comfortable mile from the sharp steeple of the Dutch Calvinist church where we all went to catechism on Saturday mornings. 

I grew up on Lake Michigan the way some people grow up on meat and potatoes. In high school we'd pair off, snuggle up in our cars at the end of the lake roads, and "park" -a wonderful teenage euphemism, today probably thought to be some kind of archaic usage. Every spring we'd seine for smelt in chest-high waders, and in the winter I remember driving old cars down miles of frozen sand. Annually there were those few golden weeks in August when Lake Michigan would warm to a tropical 68 degrees, and everyone would go in, confident that Bermuda had nothing on southwestern Wisconsin and our own big lake.

On hot summer nights we'd barefoot the wet shore, the continuous ebb and flow of lake waves as refreshing as a quart jar of icy lemonade after twenty acres of baling hay, its peaceful lapping as firm and reassuring as Christmas in a little Dutch Calvinist town. Often, it brought out the best in us, a walk like that, for you can't talk trivia when your footsteps have been forever erased a moment after you've left them. There was something there on the beach like that. Perhaps it's that kind of mystical presence that makes me say I grew up on Lake Michigan, as if she, or he, shaped me as surely as the smooth driftwood it offers up during every season of the year.

It's that kind of mystical presence I want my children to feel when I bring them to the shoreline now, years later, a time when too much of the beach is now sentried by bright yellow "No Trespassing" signs. But we go anyway, though it's the middle of winter.

Tomorrow: finis

Me and the Today Show

When I think back to it, I'm a little surprised that I don't remember a time in my life when there was no television. I remember what our first one looked like--like this:

a whole lot of box and not much screen. It was black and white, of course, and it had a dozen tubes in the cabinet behind. Honestly, it seems to me that, like a naughty kid, it required a little banging around once in a while to keep it on the straight and narrow. I remember my father whacking its side, and I also remember him telling me that I shouldn't be so harsh with the old thing.

I wasn't very old then, and, as I said, when I remember it sitting there, I can't help think it was more than a little, well, progressive of them, stern Republican conservatives and very religious people as they were, to buy a set, as we called it. . ."a TV set." I don't really remember a time when there wasn't "a set" in our house. (Do people say that anymore?) And I remember the aerial: like some Dutch Reformed people, they didn't stick it in the attic where no one could see it.

Oddly enough, during my own earliest years I don't remember sitting around the set as a family and watching some of those early shows. I don't know why not. I remember Saturday night Gunsmoke, but that seems to me to have been much later. 

What I do remember and (therefore can safely judge) will never forget was Dave Garroway and the irrepressible J Fred Muggs, his sidekick monkey. It may not seem odd today and it probably wasn't then either, but that monkey stole the show for me at least, kept me glued to the set right through my morning fare of Sugar Pops--"Sugar Pops are tops," or so the ditty went, an ad I may well have seen during the Today show.

I was four years old in 1952, the date The Today Show, starring Dave Garroway, first aired, the oldest show on television. Child psychologists might dispute this, but I'm not sure I remember anything before that time, so not long ago when the Today Show celebrated its 70th anniversary, I couldn't help but remember how Garroway and that monkey buddy of his were guests at our place every last morning of my childhood--well, just weekdays: it was cartoons on Saturday. The set went dark and dumb on the Sabbath (Sunday TV would take a few more years--although not many because Lassie came on right before church on Sunday evenings).

I don't watch the Today Show anymore. Maybe I should. Our set is turned to CNN or MSNBC (yes, I know them's fighting words). I've nothing against the Today Show or NBC these days, and I'm really taken by the fact that the Today Show, so much a part of my childhood, has been a staple of American mornings for as long as it has. "Good morning," Dave Garroway said on January 14, 1952. "The very first good morning of what I hope or suspect will be a great many good mornings between you and I."

And it has been, most probably far beyond his wildest dreams.

Me? I can't dream of a breakfast (haven't had Sugar Pops for years--can you still buy them?) without the news, thanks to my dad, who, with me, sat at the kitchen bar and devoured Corn Flakes while listening to Dave Garroway talk about the news. I don't think I'm addicted to morning news, but a breakfast without them would be more difficult than a morning without breakfast.

So my heartiest congratulations to NBC for 70 years of that show, on a medium that changes as often as the weather. Congrats to the Today Show, and thanks, Dad, for Garroway and J Fred, for the set itself, and an early morning diet of headlines, for creating in me a hunger to know what's going on in this big, wide world. 

What's the point?

What poetry, even King David's, is good for is the bracing and blessed reminder that even in our darkest moments we're not as alone as we might believe. The human experience includes darkness so thick it's hard to believe others can have any idea how it feels to be on our knees. Poetry reminds us, in small and sometimes lovely ways, that there is a crowd of witnesses who know. They do. We're not alone.

Kim Stafford's "What For" showed up a couple of days ago, courtesy of the Writers Almanac. Goes like this:

What is beauty for—
sunset searing my soul
without thought or plan?

Why should beauty simply show up in our lives? in a couple of lonely corn stalks along the side of road on a gloomy January morning? What's the point of sunsets or dawns? of wonderfully sweet honey? of stones that get polished into luxury by the pounding sea?

Dawn green beauty, bee hum honey,
stone in hand so silky the long sea
worked centuries to ravish?

What's the point of beauty. For that matter, what's the point of pain? 

And what for pain—thorn
in heart for my hurt child,
dumb ache for my brother gone

thirty years, slow burn of disgrace
when I fail at what I am to do: to see
my country bruised and torn?

No matter what it's source--why is there pain? What's the point?

She pages through her own catalogue of human experience, from the blessings of beauty to the despair of war, from a handful of smooth stones to years--even lifetimes--of grief. What's it all for? Why am I here? What's the point?

A simple answer:

So, to make good things—
a song, a kind act, a friendship—
feed on beauty at every turn.

Okay, that's not bad. Had she stopped right there, after a stanza that begins like a sermon, with a so or a thusly or therefore, the poem might work up a smile, but not quite convince: "to make good things." If the poem stopped right there, it'll pass as a Hallmark card. 

But it doesn't end there:

And to make truth, feed on sorrows,
gnash their salty structures,
bite the bitter rind.

Can we really "make truth," can we ring joy from sorrow? Like it or not, she hints, it's what we do. It's our job, our calling, our mission: to wring truth and joy from "the bitter rind." That's the point. The writer's job--and all of ours really--is to make sense of it, to "make truth."

It's not the first q and a of the Westminster Catechism, but, in a way, I can't help thinking it is. 

Sunday morning med--Groanings

“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous. . .” Psalm 32:11

All day, an intermittent screech would come crashing through the open basement window of my office. A son of the couple who used to live next door was cleaning out his deceased-father’s three-stall garage—old tools, old two by fours, old whatevers--creating a sprawling junk pyramid that attracted me for some shady reason, but, thankfully, I stayed away.

I couldn’t see the guy from where I sat, but whenever he’d emerge from the shadowy interior, I heard every last armful of trash come down on the pile. The old man was an ace tinker-er and a pack rat to boot. It was a colossal job.

And creepy. The pile of stuff one accumulates throughout life is incredible. Before we moved, I’d used to think I'd like to move out of town like we have, somewhere where the massive prairie sky is a daily—and nightly—art museum. What kept me me from looking for another place, however, was the gargantuan task of moving, which would necessarily include the job my neighbor’s son was doing yesterday—tossing out mountains of really valuable stuff. Sure. I couldn’t do it.

There in my office, I was surrounded by things I couldn’t think of tossing, things that would, someday, be just so much crapola to my kids. Maybe I ought to buy one of those little gizmos that produce lettered plastic tape and label everything—“this is a trophy I got for longest putt at a teachers’ tournament in Lafayette County, Wisconsin.” If they could identify it, I told mysellf, I’m sure they’d keep it.

Upstairs, I’ve got two shelves of old Dutch books, some of which come from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, preachers in ye olden days. There are others, a dozen at least, that I bought for almost nothing at an auction. Some of them were published about the time the Mayflower set anchor off Massachusetts. When I’m gone, will anyone care about those ancient things?—or will they be the bill for yet another auction, where some anxious fancier will pick them up for peanuts and put them carefully on another bookshelf until she dies. It's an endless cycle.

Back then, maybe for the first time, that next door junk pile reminded me, all too clearly, of my own life’s detritus, something that, back then, would never have entered my mind but today, twenty years later, is painful and haunting because my wife and I are still sifting, even though we've moved--twice!!--since then.

By human standards, it’s impossible to deny that life is tragic; there’s no escaping the grim reaper, after all. Life is like licking honey from a thorn, someone told me recently. We all must go. All things must pass. Someday, my books, my baseball trophies, my ergonomic keyboard—it’s all got to go. My wife, even my children, and theirs—my beloved grandkids—nobody stays.

Like so many Bible verses for those of us steeped in them, the last verse of Psalm 32 barely makes a sound in din ongoing in my overextended life. It’s altogether too easy to pass over the triumph. “Rejoice,” King David the forgiven says. “Rejoice in the Lord and be glad.” It’s not a whimper or a whisper. It’s a shout because what needs to be routed is the despair we all come heir to as flesh weakens and spirits collapse before a rectangular hole in the ground.

Rejoice, David says, as do all believers. Rejoice and be glad. Rejoice in His love because the Lord, the almighty tinkerer, makes all things new, even the junk next door—the pile here in my office and the mess in my heart.

Rejoice! The Truth of the matter is we really never get tossed. 

Iconic Great Plains 2

 

This shot, from 2012, west of Hawarden, is yet another variation on theme. What's up the hill here is more than a solitary tree--there's three of them, and it's an abandoned cemetery. Three stones, wearied by time and passing seasons, are exactly what they're supposed to be--remembrances. 

This one (south of Highland) has a nice balance--the tree, a veteran of those seasons, takes over visually just as much as the radiant dawn behind it, all of which create some sweet teamwork in this story, an almost coordinated mix between character (the single tree) and setting (a beautiful but not overwhelming prairie dawn). 

And then there's this story. This cottonwood, rangy and monstrously old, was a long-time favorite. My use of past tense suggests where this story is going.

Isn't she something, huge and very much alone just a bit north and east of Lebanon. But then, like all living things, Ecclesiastes might say, all things must pass. Coming up on it in the winter of 2012 was dreadful, like losing a friend.

Truth be told, I've attended more than my share of funerals in the last twenty years, and when they've been friends, I miss 'em. Some put up a gallant fight, but the grim reaper comes for all of us.

That's enough on death and dying, so I'm going to cheat my way back to where all of this started--a single tree on a broad, almost endless plain--cheat because I'm not sure the Texas Hill Country counts as Great Plains. If it does, then this one is yet another take.

We've been from Siouxland long enough. Time to get home again. It's very early here, too early really for a good shot; and if you think you've been here before, you have--south of Highland along a road that really never gets smoothed.

I think I've been at this long enough. This once was taken in 2013, into my third year of retirement, I didn't go out with the camera all that often anymore because we moved out into the country. Hence, fewer icons. Here's one from 2014, on an endless Kansas prairie preserve, one of my all time faves. Not only is the sky a dream, the wave in the land--no, I didn't put it there--just sings, don't you think?

This one isfar closer to home, in the hills along the Little Sioux, south and east of Sutherland. I've been there a dozen times.

This is another favorite, even though the up-close tree has some good neighbors. It's taken on a frigid January morning just off Lake Oahe, the Missouri River, on the far east side of the Cheyenne River Reservation. The golden light is dawn's wonderful Midas touch.

I'm ranging again. Here's another from the Little Sioux River valley, not at all far away. It's like all the others, none quite the same. After the parade I've put up together here, this guy's squatty look makes you giggle. But it's beautiful, isn't it? And that's a good thing all by itself.

That's enough. I could go on for hours and hours, a sure sign of my old age. But how about we end tour with a story of a picture. 

It's hard to know what's most attractive about this shot. Once again, we've got a single tree atop a bare plain, a kissing cousin of the others, but there's more to the story. The perfect rows of corn stubble off to the left, for instance, and the wild and bright whites created by shapely drifts on the leeward side of the fence, not to mention the fence itself; and then the feature that made me get out of the car to get the best story--that lonesome trail of prints left behind by some deer, homeward bound in the winter's cold. 

Maybe I'm just dreaming. Who cares? It's all kind of there in this shot, just west of the Big Sioux one ice-cold January morning. 

I may have talked myself into something here. Thanks for staying with me.