When you take a prairie girl to the mountains, her eyes will grow wide. The beauty is big. You don’t have to look for it. Her breath will catch at every corner, every tree, every snow-summit.
Yet when you take a mountain man to the prairie, his eyes will dim. Big sky, big land, but beauty? Not in the way he’s used to. It’s cold. It’s barren. It’s empty. It’s flat.
So the prairie girl teaches him to look. To slow down. To get low and say hello to the grass. To look closely and find the lilies in the meadow; the lupins along the road.
And he’ll find them. For he is not blind, and a mountain man already knows the serenity of a lake, the cool recharge of a summit-blown wind, the soft peace of rain on rock.
Quickly, he will learn to see the plains like waves on water. He will feel the warm chinook winds wash over him in the evening. He will blow dandelion seeds and watch them float for miles against a fiery setting sun.
And she will smile, the prairie girl at her mountain man, as they walk along a dusty dirt road counting cat-tails. She will point to the blackbirds cawing this way and that; to the frogs hopping between mud puddles. She will watch as he sees the silhouettes against the growing dusk, the rumbling thunder in the distance, the deer paths through the tall grass. And she will know, when they return to his home, that he will always stop, slow down, and say hello to the lupins along the road.
If you enjoyed this short piece, you may enjoy my printed short story collection, Brittle Leaves & Broken Eaves. Check it out here!
Jessica Barratt 