Here, everything is very modest. The environment threatens to overtake everything if you're not careful. It will consume you, in one way or the other. There are probably more animals than people. The landscape is incredible, barren and dispersed but also somehow lush and giving. This is what molds us. This is what gives us our stereotypical Midwestern friendliness. This is what sets us apart, good or bad. Something in the land, in the way that the silos stand sentry over us, season by season. Something in the way that squat little barns, the womb of any farm, huddle apologetically amidst the farmhouses and cows. And cows. And cows and cows and cows. Something in the way a dog will run, tail wagging, up a long driveway to see if you belong to him. Something in the way that sumac, the most plebian of weeds, becomes a roadside ditch peacock and reminds us that things that are beautiful are sometimes poison too. Something in the way we settle in, like it or not, until we've worn a groove into the earth. And we belong. We belong to this strange often-ridiculed land, the butt of jokes we don't even understand, far more than it belongs to us. It’s the soil in which our family trees grow. It's beneath our fingernails.