Kansas sunset
It’s Day 14 of Writing Our Stories. It’s also Kansas Day. On January 29, 1861, Kansas became the 34th state.
So, today, the writing prompt is: write about your state.
You may live in Connecticut or Wisconsin or Missouri. So your mission is to write about some aspect of your state – the state where you were raised or the state you’re living in now.
For me, it’s always been Kansas: land and sky. The horizon has always been an imprint, always a line I see separating the heavens and the earth.
What would I write about Kansas? (Ha – what haven’t I written about Kansas?)
Let’s just go with land, for starters.
* The other night Dave and I were watching passenger train videos from Europe, mostly from Norway and snowy Switzerland. A map of Switzerland was on the screen to show the train route and I wondered, how big is Switzerland? It looked like a pretty big country. I checked. It’s almost 16,000 square miles. Kansas is nearly 82,000 square miles. Of course, Switzerland has more vertical miles than Kansas. I could write about the size and shape of Kansas.
* In writing about the land, I could write about traveling the highways, write about the many things Dave and I have seen on our day trips. Favorite highways, K-99, K-4.
* I could write about the feeling of freedom that seeing long distances gives me.
* I could write about my personal experiences with various Kansas symbols: sunflowers that grew on grandma’s farm, cottonwood trees in my hometown that shed cotton, the meadowlarks that sang at the cemetery. I could write about windmills and sunsets.
* I could write about studying Kansas in 2nd grade, coloring in sunflowers, drawing a rectangle for a map of the state – making sure to add the jagged line in the northeast corner.
So, your state. What will you write about today?
Go get ‘em! Cheryl
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