The Outback

 

A shot like this is all I need to explain our move to the country, post retirement. I didn't have to get into the pickup to gather this kind of bounty; I had only to step out of our back door to fill up a memory card with this show of "dawn's early light."

On mornings like this one--mid July, 2012--I couldn't help but wonder how it was we'd come to live so close to these big prairie skies and really never seen them.

With our move to the country 14 years ago, we became bit players in the drama staged daily in the immensity of our abundant open spaces. 

On more than occasional Saturday mornings, I'd been wandering around Siouxland for a decade already when we moved north of Alton, so skies like this--no matter how gorgeous--weren't exactly new. But they'd never been so neighborly, so showy, so close. On this particular July morning, I had only to walk a couple hundred feet from our back door--and there it was.

From under the canopy of a monster cottonwood that morning, I was visited by an ancient neighbor, gifted with the blessing of dawn. 

Siouxland had never been so much our backyard.