Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

From the Softer Side...

It's tornado season again in Kansas. If you are a native of 'tornado alley', summertime means hot weather, ball games, cold beer, fresh corn on the cob... and tornados. For those of us who grew up in tornado alley, it's the time of year when we automatically go into 'weather-alert mode.' We go about our daily business but with a heightened 'third eye' tuned to the sky. It's a tornadoey-cultural thing that probably only us mid-westerners understand.

People often ask us how we can stand to live in a place where tornados happen annually. First of all, tornados are the least of your worries if you choose to live in Kansas. It's the conservative right-to-lifers and redneck bigots that strike greater fear in our hearts. Tornados can be explained and tracked on radar. Oppsie..

OK, Clarke says to be nice so I'm going to reflect on what I will miss about Kansas. I will miss our friends and family, our Goodwill store, O'Douls beer, Kansas City BBQ, our wonderful Kansas thunderstorms, lightning bugs in June, the smell of honeysuckle in the summer breeze, home-grown beefsteak tomatoes - ripe off the vine, our change of seasons. There is nothing more beautiful than autumn in Kansas or the Kansas flint hills in springtime. These cherished memories will be with me always and make me who I am today... a down-home, deaf girl from Kansas who's lucky to be married to a red-headed, crazy, one-eyed military brat who still makes me laugh after all these years.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road~

P.S. Dorothy was wrong.

Brennie~