You cannot live in a place for 18 years of your life without part of it getting inside of you. Even if the popular image of that place is that it’s full of God-fearing bigots who want all gay people to burn in Hell and to ban evolutionary theory from schools. The people can be small-minded, conservative, terrified of anyone different from themselves.
There’s a lot to dislike, or even be ashamed of, for Kansas. But there’s a lot I love about my home state too.
I love how friendly people are in everyday interactions. Shopkeepers are generally friendly, pleasant. It’s rare that I get truly rude service.
I love the wide open prairie. I love the thunder storms that come rolling across in the late summer. I even like the thrill of tornado warnings, hiding in the basement, listening to the radio and wondering what kind of damage will be done.
I love fishing in the rivers and lakes for crappie and catfish. Nothing beats reeling in a 8 pound channel cat.
I love walking on the boardwalks in the wetlands and spotting dozens of different species of waterfowl.
I love walking downtown in Lawrence, watching the crowds. I love the little shops and restaurants that have been there doing their things since I was a kid.
I love the night sounds of cicadas and cricket frogs on a summer night.
I love the way it smells, just as the sun sets, when the fireflies are out. (We don’t seem to have fireflies in Colorado).
I love counting the red tail hawks sitting atop fence posts and billboards as I drive down the highway.
I love that it doesn’t snow very often.
I love the distant sound of of the Santa Fe Rail trains making their way across the plains for Denver.
I love that my family is gathered all in the same 100 mile radius, and I can see most of them whenever I come back.
I constantly fight the urge to move back there. I know that so much about the place would bother me if I actually lived there. I write about Kansas constantly. I think my love is best appreciated from afar, perhaps.
Shout out, fellow Kansans. What do you love and hate about Kansas?
Tags: kansas
Maybe it’s because I’m not in Kansas anymore, but I love everything about it. And even in writing that sentence, I know it’s a lie. I love Lawrence, not so much Kansas.
I do think Kansans, in general are about as good as it gets. Kansans are friendly, unlike their East Coast counterparts, but they aren’t intrusive, like Southerners. They are modest and humble, educated, and hard-working. Sure, there are a lot of religious people in Kansas, but they are, in my interactions with them, the “good” kind of religious people, those of true, if misguided faith. They’re happy to tell you about their religion, but they don’t force it on you, and don’t look down on you if you don’t follow the same belief system.
Kansas is beautiful in the spring, summer, and fall. During those months, I look around and think, “Why doesn’t EVERYONE live here?”. But Kansas is dreadful in the winter time. Unrelieved expanses of gray, brown, and mud. During the winter months, I think, “Why does ANYONE live here?” I’ve experienced the worst depressions of my life during February in Kansas.
I’m homesick every single day. Maybe I wouldn’t be if I didn’t hate where I currently live, but I suspect that I would. My parents live on property that Hoovers have owned since the 1860s. There is a church about a mile north of their house. My great-great grandfather founded it, and helped to build it. In as much as any American is still attached to the land, I am. I know every hill, valley, tree, and curve in the road on the drive from Lawrence to my parents home. I can’t imagine not returning to that area, once I am able. It’s home to me, like no other place ever will be.
I have a similarly contradictory relationship with Texas.
I love a lot of things about Kansas, and Lawrence in particular. Every time I go back, I’m psyched to be there. Then, something like a week later, I’m ready to leave.
Lawrence is great, don’t get me wrong. However, after I’ve been there for a bit, I start to get the same claustrophobic feelings I did when I lived there. “Hey, we went to grade school together. Are we saying hi? No? Okay, cool. Oh, we are! Yes, hi, didn’t see you there.” Ugh. Every place is a place where something happened once, and memories haunt the scenes like ghosts.
Every time I go back, I’m struck by how the Lawrence I sometimes miss isn’t really there anymore. It’s fragmented and scattered to the wind. It’s a sociogeographic construct from the years leading up to the millennium, and only the geography remains. The rest of it is in Los Angeles and New York and Seattle and Portland and Boulder.
Also, I like seafood, surfing, and Democrats.
I’ve lived a fair number of wildly disparate places now, and I know that I tend to idealize those in which I no longer live. That said, it wouldn’t really surprise me if I did move back to Lawrence again someday. But it would have to be in pursuit of something that is there, rather than in search of something that was.