He left his farm only once for a funeral in Albuquerque—his brother’s, the one who didn’t move to Kansas forty years before. Papa left school when his dad died—farming by age fifteen, Papa began his wide sky scan from fields north of Iola, southeast of Emporia.
I watch it, too, but with my weather app open, home’s narrow window wedged beside other places I’ve been: west of Paris, or Chisinau, or Hong Kong—north of New Orleans, San Miguel, and farther, still, Montevideo. I see the storm due south, Central Mexico, with a lightning splice and after-boom Papa would recognize. He’d know the tremor, feel it in his body’s frame, in his Sears Roebuck kit house, half a mile west of Aliceville, pop. 273.
Watch my thumb pull up a different clime, Mong Kok’s tropic smell, a jungle water table so surface-close it slips through your skin, a steady seep, something like the corner of Royal and Frenchmen Streets, NOLA, where the damp draws you under. Papa never knew such wet, never saw its squander, live oaks spilling moss waterfalls.
He knew only his thinner pale sky, more dust than rain—wind peeling off field skin.
I hold my phone’s weather app, smooth and cool, watch for the signs—neat icons, clouds running blue drops, 40% chance before this midnight, the curled wind swish, Tuesday through Friday. I see where in the world there’s rain, where there might be.
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Kristin Van Tassel lives and teaches in rural Central Kansas. She writes essays and poetry about place, travel, and teaching. Her work has appeared in Wraparound South, World Hum, Wanderlust, Capsule Stories, Temenos, The Land Report, and About Place.