Back to the prarie

Making the transition back to the prairie from Vermont just means reversing everything.  If the roads in Vermont are crooked, narrow and winding, then the roads in North Dakota are straight, level, and wide.  If everywhere you look in Vermont you see trees and forest, then just exchange the trees for wheat and pasture to get North Dakota.  Get out the iron, and Iron the hills out of Vermont.  Once you do, it might be as big as North Dakota.  In North Dakota you can always see ten or thirty miles.  In Vermont you might be able to see one mile.  Wood is scarce in North Dakota, and good wood is even more scarce.  In Vermont you cannot cut good wood down fast enough, so you have wonderful uses of wood.  We have stones, they have stones.  We pile ours up in a pile and let them ferment, but in Vermont they turn into stone fences and structures.  Our stones were dropped by glaciers, theirs came from crumbling mountains.

Both places have some wonderful peacefulness and solitude.  People are spread thin in North Dakota, but fairly evenly.  Vermont tends to congregate people along the streams and valleys.  The Kadizzles find themselves transitioning from three major ecoscapes, the plains, the desert, and the mountains.  One of the most amazing things about our country is the variety.  Try to think of a country with as many different ecosystems as the United States.  If you have not taken the time to get out and see your back yard, which is the whole country, you need to do it.  You will never get done.

Kadizzle has visted just about every part of the country except Hawaii.  If asked where you can see the most in the least area Kadizzle always says southern Utah.  More properly you might call it the four corners area.  If you go from Phoenix to Denver and take your time wandering you will get one hell of a bang for your bucks.  The Commander and Kadizzle have spent about 16 years checking out that general area and could easily spend another ten and not get done.

Soon it will be time for the fall transition to the southwest.  Again it will  be like landing on another planet.  Everything will be the same, but different.  In the meantime we have to do the fall transition.  That means put away the house, the garden, and put the unruly pheasants in the refrigerator.

Life is all about transitions.  From a man, to a husband, to a father, to a grandfather, from a worker to a retired person,  from a father to a father in law, from a learner to a teacher, from a young man to an old man.  The transitions are transitions of place, thought, and finally the great transition to the beyond.  Fall is a time of transition.  Fall can be approached in two ways in North Dakota.  First, you can hunker down and prepare for the blast from the arctic, or our preferred method is to run south as fast as you can.

The Commander will be a whirlwind of activity putting the garden to sleep, and going completely insane every time a leaf falls on the lawn.  Maybe a vistit to old Sandy's hunting lodge by his little lake.  It looks like Old Jim Riddle the southern gentleman is going to fly out for a pheasant hunt, and on it goes.  The Earth turns, the moon turns red every thirty years, and life goes on.