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Extract from Wonderful—A Life on the Prairie by Emily Gale

The first time I saw the prairie was like waking from a dream, suddenly and vibrantly aware of my surroundings in a way I’d never been before.

Every color was brighter, every sound clearer, every flowering thing more beautiful and mesmerizing and fragrant.

I gazed upon the shimmering mirage of emeralds and golds and couldn’t believe such a place existed, or that I would now call that place home.

It was heaven, if you believe in such a thing. A fairy tale, if you don’t.

Back in the city, I had marveled at the great showmen and carnival hucksters with their clever tricks and impossible illusions, but those first months on the prairie taught me that nature is the only true magician.

Spend a moment watching the hypnotic beauty of a single stalk of golden wheat nodding in the gentle morning breeze, or feel the thrill of the first green shoots pushing up through the dirt, then tell me there isn’t magic here, that you are not bewitched by its beauty, as I was.

Some thought we were fools to try and build a new life here.

Others thought we were brave. Perhaps we were a little of both.

Even with the storm that whirled in my heart, heavy with the knowledge of what I’d left behind, I felt the thrill of arriving somewhere extraordinary.

Here was a place I could call home, a life to be fully lived, a story waiting to be written among the furrows of our newly plowed earth.

I dug myself in, planted my hopes and dreams and love into the rich Kansas soil and waited for them to flourish beneath the generous sun and benevolent rains.

I had yet to learn that the prairie would not be so easily tamed; that our story here wouldn’t be shaped by the color of our dreams, but by the struggles we would endure and the courage we would find to keep going…