The Prairie Awaits

Now don't get me wrong, I love ol' Manhattan and living in the Midwest is the closest I will ever get to my dream life on the prairie, but shoot, this girl was made for another era!  For years and years and years and years I have been known to read a plethora of books so generously coined "prairie books" (typically comlpete with some sort of scowl) by my dear and favorite sister Sarah.  If you are unfamiliar with the term or even the concept, the majority of said "prairie books" are written by Christian women, most likely just as infatuated as I am by the simplicity and hard working days of prairie life, usually about young women who fall in love, have babies, wear cotton dresses, bake, make friends, and grow to love the Lord more through conflict, struggle, lots of sad sickness and death, and the occasional prairie fire.  Now, please tell me, what about that situation does not sound like something I would like to be a part of??  Exactly. 

I have read approximately 87,009 of these delectible novels and sometimes find myself longing for this time, place, era, that I know only in my beautiful imagination.  I asked Nick if we could move to the prairie and throw out our cell phones and grow our own food and have black-and-white-spotted-cows and build our own cabin... but he said no.  UHH, why the heck not??  I could teach in that precious one-room schoolhouse, and we could have a wagon, and we could live in the wide open hills and spaces and stop missing God in nature because He would be so much easier to see!

I do understand the unrealistic nature of my desire, as well as that the seemingly ideal prairie days too came with hardship and struggle just as our fast-paced, high-tech, busy days do as well, but continue to long for a slower, more simple life.  I suppose I could throw out my phone and shut my computer and turn off the tv, I could become even more of a hermit and have babies (in 43 years) and bake and have a cow (in our apartment?!), but the times call for speed, for keeping up with the Jones' (who are they, anyway??), for rushing, for living vicariously through our to-do lists, and so on.

Perhaps I will continue to, despite my dear husbands pleadings, decorate our little home with touches of the prairie (thank you Mom and Mona for giving us the craft-fair upbringing you did) and begin to simplify my life in the here and now, secretly wishing just a teeny bit that someday, maaaayyybe someday, Mr. Brown will move us out to the hills and all my bestest friends will be the neighbors that live a mile walk away and we WILL one day drink lemonade on our porches and raise those babies to be best friends just like us.