This summer, we're going here.
The Flint Hills of Kansas is the world's largest remaining preserve of tallgrass prairie, the only unit of our National Park System dedicated to grassland. National Geographic featured an article about the Flint Hills last year, which is where I found the above photo. I find the idea fascinating that we still have a grassland preserve stretching into three states. There's a magic to be found in grass, you know. Afterall, where do you think fairies live?
My junior year in high school, we studied American Literature and had to create a "Lit Log" each quarter summarizing, through images and text, what we had been studying. It really changed my relationship with literature and opened my eyes to a few subgroups of American literature that I still adore. One unit that I particularly remember concerned the poets associated with American Transcendentalism and Realism, particularly Walt Whitman. I connected with Whitman's use of free verse and the vision he had of America. And though I am by no means a fan of war history, his perspective of Civil War America was the perspective that I chose to embrace, perhaps because they are more about the humanity of war and less about the factual data. My lit log entry about Whitman was a depiction of the "curling grass" he described in his poem, "A child said, What is the grass?" I distinctly remember curling green construction paper with a pencil and dreaming of the America he shared with me.
Inspired by the very "limitless, lonesome prairie" that we'll be visiting, Whitman described the tallgrass this way:
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition,
Out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners,
That we may see and remark, and say, 'Whose?'
So in a few months, my family will see this hopeful green stuff, feel the handkerchief of the Lord in our hands, and smell the scented gift created for us by Him. And if the children ask, 'Whose?,' I will say, 'Ours.'
I remember sitting up late watching you girls make the lit logs. I loved it. Of course I wasn't the one "creating" them. Wouldn't you like to tell Mr. Hole what it meant to you 15 years later? There really was a method to his madness. When Bekah was here last year she brought in one of her bins. All her lit logs were there to groan over. Secretly, I think she had a lttle smile on her face.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the sweet memory. Now I want to rush to the library and get a book of Whitman's poems. Alas, they are closed!
I should email him. Hmm.
ReplyDelete