My hair is the color of the prairie. Golden and gray and brown. I fit in here. I know that. I feel that.

They tell me, jokingly, that I don’t have to leave. Ever. And I turn that idea over and around in my head, wind-blown like the swaying golden grasses in the field alongside the path that leads to the bee hives, where I walked yesterday morning and rode my bike last night at sunset before putting the chickens to bed.

I think back to my free-form gardens over the years punctuated with winter wheat and summer sorghum; that thistle meadow that my mom and I usually go to every Sunday, and where I went during hospital breaks when she almost died a few years ago; the beach grasses I grew up with and passed just last week when I dipped my bike tire in the Atlantic Ocean; the wild under the power lines by my neighborhood that they always try to kill but can’t — and where you can almost always find me if you don’t know where else I am. Swaying golden grasses mean I am home, wherever it is my travels or travails take me.

I even feel so safe here, both on and off my bike, that I’ve started remembering my dreams for the first time since before the pandemic. I feel myself healing, in ways I didn’t even know I was broken.

The day will come when I will pack up my stuff and board another bus. I will move on to what’s next — hoping, praying, it’s not like the disaster I had at the intended WWOOF stay right before this (for which, however, I’m grateful because that turn-of-events brought me here). I will trust the journey.

Birdsong surrounds me right now. I open the stained glass door to a new morning, knowing my time here is, indeed, limited and these views of the prairie are fleeting. But for today they are my reality. My life. My joy.

And that is golden.

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