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Many years later…

Seven years passed before the rain returned to Kansas and the prairie bloomed, once again, in all the colors of the rainbow.

It would be many more years before I returned to finally see for myself the golden stalks of wheat dancing in the gentle morning breeze, to hear the song of the meadowlark and watch an ocean of wildflowers stretch as far as the horizon.

But that’s another story, for another time.

This is Auntie Em’s story. Hers and my dear mother’s.

It is also the story of all the women and men who endured those hard years of dust and drought, and who somehow found a reason to hope, to wonder, to dream once again.

Auntie Em always believed in the magic of this place. Most of all, she believed in me.

She taught me a sense of wonder, to see not just the apple but the beauty of the blossom inside.

She taught me to stop for a moment and look at the sunset, to marvel in its splendor.

She taught me see rain and hail and snowstorms and sun not just as the day’s weather but as part of a greater cycle of connected things: strings on a fiddle, notes that only make sense when played together.

But perhaps the most important thing she taught me is that home can be anywhere, as long as you are with those you love, and who love you in return.

She gave me the package of letters on my sixteenth birthday. A letter to mark the occasion of each of my birthdays. Some from my mother. Some from Auntie Em. There was such love stitched among the words.

Plenty of secrets, too.

It was difficult to read my mother’s words in the final letter, to feel her anguish in telling me that the man I had known as her friend was, in fact, my father.

She wrote of him with such affection. Leonardo Stregone.

The man she had loved for most of her life, even though most of her life had been spent without him.

I hope you can forgive me for keeping him a secret.

I hope that you will know him, in time. I have often wondered what she would have thought of his rainmaking claims, and of the man he had become.

I eventually learned that Auntie Em had told Uncle Henry everything she knew about Mr.Stregone not long after the big dust storm.

After a while, he accepted her reasons for keeping the truth from him.

He understood that it had come from a place of love, not deceit; that she had wanted to protect him and couldn’t bear to take away the joy and hope that my arrival and our relationship had given him.

He wished she’d shared her secret with him all the same.

He hated to think of her worrying on her own.

“We are a team,” he said. “Always.” There were other secrets she told him in the aftermath of the storm, too.

They hid nothing from each other ever since.

Despite the passing years, dear Uncle Henry still pulls coins from behind my ear.

And the silver shoes finally fit me. When I wear them, I think of my mother.

I feel her at my shoulder, gently guiding me in the pursuit of my wishes.

Sometimes I flip my carnival coin and think of my father.

He writes occasionally, just a line or two, but it is enough.

He didn’t succeed in bringing the rain to Kansas with his marvelous machines, but I remember the hope and wonder he brought for a few precious days as Adelaide flew the Jenny and he sent his balloons into the sky.

Not a magician after all, but the possibility was magic enough.

Auntie Nell finally encouraged Auntie Em to turn her prairie journal into a book about those hard years.

She says nobody will ever read it, that nobody will be interested in hearing the story of an ordinary farmer’s wife, but I think she will be surprised.

She is the beating heart of so many lives, a great and powerful woman who taught me that an inquisitive mind, a kind heart, and a brave soul can take you anywhere.

In any event, she was glad to have written it all down.

She wanted people to understand what happened here, to make sure that it will never happen again.

On quiet mornings, when the wheat dances in shades of green and gold and I have the prairie to myself for a few precious moments, I think of her, thank her, whisper her name to the wind.

My dear Auntie Em.

My sun. My moon. My north star.

My home.