Nothing disturbed me or this new person – the morning person who resembles me but is a much more gifted writer. He is a little more relaxed, he has the entire day ahead whether he writes into the late morning or early afternoon. He is more optimistic as long as he is pumped with coffee and his morning cereal. His fingers work across the keyboard the way they might guitar strings. His mind was on the scene, anything he can render beautiful, he does, from inanimate objects and landscapes to memories and women, love and obsession, put to paper delicately and with the senses so that you can feel the characters breathing.

Some life he has, waking to write and then returning to bed until the next morning. He lives only for the passion. His world is words and he doesn’t have to dwell in reality, but he does sometimes, coming to life in gardens and back porches, natural settings where a vine winding through a checked fence might take him to another garden, fly him away to a gazebo when he was married, another he saw in a film, another he drove past on next to a bed and breakfast on a forgotten highway. Those places might become a place in his stories some time. He may have written about it this morning:

About 100 steps off the road, near the houses back corner, the lower branches from the forest behind jut shadows on the pointed gazebo roof. The white paint stands out in the pattern against the dark backdrop and though it’s near traffic, it’s a world away. There’s a university nearby and red bricks in the roads that stretch past the library. Quiet house fronts with screen doors left open, fraternity and sorority houses painted the same color white as the gazebo and nearly lifeless in the day time, but alive with bodies and half-shaded bodies in the parking lots at night.

Up the street is the old downtown district – tall, slender old buildings with antique shops, a video store and pizza place that are far taller than they are wide. In the winter, the windows in them steam up at the edges, the lights seems to move to the center and families sit at small tables with paper napkins tucked in their laps in moments as warm as the eateries. Outside the shops are orange newspaper racks that match the university mascot, a jaguar, the likes of which are seldom seem scampering across the surrounding farm fields.

The town is almost a cliché with the towering trees overshadowing the narrow university streets, the feel of the academic buildings seemingly spilling across the street into the residential housing – big, broad houses with wide front porches and steps with flecking paint, bicycles leaning against house-sides, small tents that children staked the night before still up on the lawn, undisturbed as though the children suddenly vanished and a new set of stranger’s kids – maybe the ones being taken on a walk by their parents – could crawl into the sleeping bags and pretend to camp out. But it’s not cliché at all. In fact, it’s so lovely and gentle here that this town could be thought the first to be this way. The students are polite and studious, not buffoons, and they are here to learn, but they are social, too. They care little that 20 minutes away is the state’s largest university, one with athletic programs that regularly compete for national titles, and programs that battle cancer and turn out engineering whizzes and rocket scientists. Everything seems content here, even the squirrels that pass before bumpers on cars that slow down.

In a town this way, the gazebo is dead spot, a place that takes relaxation and manages to slow it down. Travelers are never destined to this place, but they stay at the bed and breakfast for a little more than the cost for the rustic motel a block away. Couples pull in the gravel drive, are greeted at the door and most come late, going directly to sleep, maybe catching breakfast at the fork and spoon across the road, and leave before the shops open. In the fall, there are some festivals that entice them to stay a full morning, but mostly their impressions about the whole town come from the inn’s country kitchen with ceramic roosters on the ledges, the folded afghans at the foot of the bed, and the wood floors that creak in sour-sounding whines that begin with sharp breaks.

The town, on weekends, is mostly good-natured students, visiting parents on occasion, the few locals who work in fast food restaurants and a few retail stores, all mixed in with tourists who’ve either lost their way or given in to their inclination to pull over before reaching where they really intend to go.

The inn keepers, Jason and Shelly, Henney, were an old married couple that had lived in smaller town before buying the cottage. Their arrival was like moving into a big city – big by way of the highway and the grocery store. They didn’t have to drive 40 minutes one way to reach one, and they didn’t have to rely solely on the food taken up from the ground or butchered in the back barn. Like anyone else in town, they could cross the street in decent weather or better and fill a cart with the supplies for the inn and to fill the cupboards for themselves, but they’d come to the age when the gazebo and the lives that the young couples who stayed with them were living appealed to them. They’s once thought they could live out there retirement here, but the stairs were too much for them both, the repairs – even rudimentary ones – were talking longer for Jason to complete, so they walked the first night in March that was warm enough to the nearest campus building, which was the science hall, climbed yet a few more stairs and posted a help wanted sign on the bulletin board next to scholarship offers and posters advertising a violin trio from the Netherlands and An Evening with Mark Twain to be put on by the local barn players.

This slope s a public park now. Empty and windblown in mid-February, nothing but last fall’s leaves loosened by a warm streak and scuttling along the dead grass. On all sides, the property eventually touches four-lane streets, rusted-out bridges or parking lots and entryways to industrial buildings. The most common traffic through the area is delivery trucks, diesels and vehicles driven by workers that flood the streets or abandon them depending on hourly schedules.

Though the walls have come down around the fireplace, it’s possible to envision where they might have been and the views from the windows in them. From the imagined windows, the prairie on a winter afternoon is golden yellow, a color as rich as wheat beer, but offering nothing in its shape that is of value or interest. The family who set the walls and stacked the fireplace probably never considered the view or that it might disappear. Much of the country looked that way, but the slope gave this place a higher view into the valley now blocked by development and transportation ways.

Desolate and certainly isolated, they were not wrapped in the prettiness only. They busied themselves during the day with the crops and the livestock. The children scattered feed to the chickens near some other outbuilding that has vanished. More animals were kept in pens and there was probably a work shed so the boy and his father could build wooden harnesses for the oxen.

Across the street from the plot is a museum dedicated to frontier life and a local family who operated a farmstead on nearby land. The museum was designed to resemble a barn crossed with modern design in the glass wall on its broad side. Closer to the road near the museum entrance is a monument that shows a wagon and some oxen pulling it. The animals and the human characters are bronze and implanted in a stone slab and they face westward as though they were following a trail. The animals leading the wagon are individual statues separated from the wall, as though they came to life and walked out from the scene.

Sanctity is a memory here as is the land and its original purpose. The museum is an attraction in colder months for field trips and, for historians, it’s of year-round interest. But in warmer weather, the field is occupied by children flying kites and playing tackle football in air heavy with smoke from burning leaf piles in the surrounding neighborhoods. Frontier families settled the land, but here it’s so evident that the world around the fields have been conquered and beaten. Both the hills and the museum halls reveal that the simplicity and maybe even the purity intended that came with the original settlements has vanished, gone a direction that previous generations had not intended.

Overhead geese families collect in the blueness – one small V-shape joining a larger group and fluttering off together according to their internal maps passed down through generations. So many landmarks familiar to them have been scraped clean and replaced with roads or modern structures that their whole navigation system might one day be displaced. This evening all is peaceful, and the birds are silent as though they were added with brush strokes to the landscape and the near springlike weather. Fading sunlight turns the dirt orange and colors the rust and draws out shadows from the small, home-made oil spiggots.

I write a mile from this rural scene and yet seldom come out here to be inspired. Some new houses have come up and a neighborhood park has been added, which makes this place a frequent visit for my family in the spring and summer. The drive is merely a means to an end, though. The asphalt roads worn down to gravel churn under the wheels while I attempt to answer questions from the back seat from excited children or tune the radio to a sound they prefer and the fields roll past. I’m oblivious to the scenery. I hadn’t been on the drive in so long and it was likely to be another few months until it warmed for good that I was careful to take it in since I woudn’t be there again.

This is the Midwest. The land keeps getting torn up so that more houses can be built free from the urban environment. Roots to the farm land and God and country are still strong in this region, as generations, in some cases, work to keep life simple and familiar. The underlieing feeling, though, is that nothing great is being last in the development. Another corn field gone or another pasture dug out to become a lake is no real significant loss. The houses keep going up and the farms that were once isolated are now neighbors to multi-family dwellings and soon afterward, strip malls and convenience stores. The trend started some 30 miles away and in the last 30 years has come out this far, to the city’s ends in all directions.

I have heard people complain about long drives in this state – that there isn’t much to see and that the views aren’t entertaining. The notion is that a farm field is boring and unattractive. Nothing beautiful can be found in them or nothing unique. Let them go for something more engaging or useful. These views are in need of as much correction as the viwer’s eyes. Open fields that roll out in a canvas for the clouds moving in shadows across the ground are a thing to behold, not to put asunder. While I spend summer mornings driving my own children from neighborhood to neighborhood, I plan to impart a lesson with them. Nature is the real beauty to behold and it can be even more so when you find it in the plainest places, untouched from the rushing days.

While the rest of the world has taken signicant leaps forward in technology and style, Wellsville, Kan., is still rooted by the same strengths it has always been – a farming community with a few square blocks of modern 1950s houses. But on this cold Saturday morning, the stagetop in the school’s auditiorium and the goings-on around it seemed timeless and common to any small town.

Once the harvest is in, the attention that is usually on the rolling farm properties – all seemingly divided tall lines of Oaks and Cottonwoods – turn to indoor pasttimes. Today the small auditorium space was transformed into a dance recital and bazaar. So frequently have recitals, plays and musicals been hosted in this space that no one could ever know with any certainy the number of performances that audiences have come to see.

There is only one high school in town. This small town still believes in small churches, in tight congregations, and the affinity for sprawling worhsipping facilities haven’t swept through the cobblestone streets the way they have the suburbs throughout the Midwest, which means the auditorium and gymnasium become community centers after school hours.

Though the churches are small here, god isn’t. The religious folk still make it here together – they know each other’s weaknesses and they pray and disuade the drunkards from entering bars or the one’s whose beliefs are waning to be faithful. Those are not actual examples, merely imaginations taken from a few-minute drive down its streets and through its historic downtown – and yet they feel true for any town that is this way.

Old women in sweaters and sweat shirts sit behind folding tables at the auditoriums edges watching the little girls in costumes and their parents perform, for everyone in on stage at a social event such as this. The tables are spread with peanut brittle, tobasco sauce, necklaces, crotched pillows and dish towels, old barn windows with snowmen drawn and painted on the glass, doll clothes, false license plates, pens, knives, corscrews and trinker toys.

The auditorium doubles as a lunch room. Like the old women, a boy scout troop has set up a table and is serving boiled hot dogs and chili straight from the crock pot at 10 am. They’ve come to show their support and turn a profit, to be supported, to belong to something and to learn skills that they’ll actually use over camp fires and following creeks on the Kansas prairies later, as teens. One boy steals his own bite from the chili pot when the line dwindles, adding his germs to the community pot.

Group after group takes the stage. The girls are various ages and the youngest acts are interspersed throughout the show. They older girls saunter out wearing everything from cheer outfits to more risque, almost burlesque-type garb, and the women who have grown up here and now sit in aluminum chairs selling crafts share well-intended, not malicious thoughts that can almost be heard aloud: “Un-ugh … I wouldn’t let my little girl wear that in her bedroom let alone in front of all these people! What are their mother’s thinking?”

When the show is over and the girls’ revealing outfits are covered with jump suits, the younger children and the boys who have waited patiently while their sisters danced take the floor and chase each other in hollow-sounding circles. This lasts for about five minutes until they pass behind the backdrop curtain and their parents, sitting on the stage ledge, decide the game has gotten too wild.

The new marks on the stage, if they were left at all, are undetectable. They simply faded directly into the trail of other years. Memory, it should be commonly understood in Wellsville, lives on longer than the act.

Weather has kept the cessnas and larger craft in the air or on the ground, wherever they were held up before the clouds came down. Hanger doors are padlocked shut and the lights inside them are dark – tools untouched and the grease spots dried in place from Sunday afternoon flights.

Tonight, a freight train rolls haunted through the industrial park to where the land smooths out and becomes corporate office grounds, runs through intersections, past the old newspaper office, the day care where the children have been picked up for the night and the play equipment is beaded with rain and the plastic sides are coated with dirt and mulch.

Now on through the intersection – flashing red lights come down in great folded arms and the long train body rolls through dim headlights, on past the historic house rows, the red-brick downtown district, the junk yard marked by chain-link fence and eyeless car bodies, then wheat fields, more bare trees, the elaborate equine ranch and trail laid out by white picket fences, then on into blackness and darker shadows.