Contiguity

Since leaving Nebraska in the fall of 2002, I've not felt a desire to return permanently. The state remains at the center of my mapa mundi, the point around which, in my mind, the rest of the universe revolves. But I haven't wanted to come back. I blame the cosmopolitan east coast, or even moreso a year in Oxford during college. Once I began to move in those circles, I didn't want to leave them. People would ask me, "do you think you'll move back someday?" And I would answer: "I don't really know," while suspecting that the real answer was "probably not."

So I was caught off-guard when, upon returning to the state for a couple of days after a month of cross-country travel, I discovered that I saw my motherland differently than in recent years.

My view was from the balcony of a friend's apartment in Omaha. She lives at the western edge of the city, looking out over a fresh six-lane road with new developments on one side and alfalfa on the other. I arrived at the bottom of the magic hour, that thirty minutes or so after the sun has slipped below the horizon but the sky retains its sunset glow. Because there were no clouds that evening, the sky was a perfectly blended strata of colors, from dark purple overhead, to midnight blue, to muddy green, to yellow, to reddish gold right above the horizon. Sparse tree branches and power lines cut tangled black silhouettes against this backdrop.

In that moment, Nebraska did not seem like a parochial, sealed place to me. It seemed to be a place, a distinct place, a place where I am from, but one that bled into the wider world to the east and to the west.