Lindsay Bartlett Rural Anonymity

RURAL ANONYMITY Lindsay Bartlett

On the prairie grain elevators dot the land like push pins on a map, marking all the places I haven’t been. On these western Kansas plains, cattle and stone posts are more common than people. Where Kansas is associated with Dorothy and that witch from the west. My hometown boasts of its barbed wire fame. The stuff settlers used to divide up the vast prairie in order to make a living from the good earth. In a place where at night they could look up and see the night sky, the same sky we see a little less clearly now. Those of us who have stayed, called these plains home taken what anonymity we could in their vastness