At heart, I will always be a midwestern girl.  I grew up in the Midwest (Indiana to be exact) and except for a brief sojourn in the American South for college, I have always lived here.

Early this month, I participated in an exercise at a conference where I was asked to speak about my cultural heritage.  This is a complicated question for many white Americans, as our immigrant ancestors likely chose to assimilate to “the melting pot,” rather than keep their cultural customs.  My particular families were mostly Irish and Russian, and I am four generations distant from those cultures.  We didn’t have any religious customs of the Catholic variety; my family became Protestant three generations ago when my Great grandmother married a second time without an annulment after her first husband deserted her.  We didn’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.  We didn’t eat Borscht or play the balalaika.

So when thinking about my cultural heritage, the culture I most resonated with was that of a Midwesterner.  But I searched my brain for what that meant.  People are fairly helpful and friendly in the Midwest.  Those of us with ties to farmland tend to be down-to-earth in a literal way.

I was brought back to this question when taking a walk today in my favorite park in Cleveland.  I come to this park because it is sheltered from the city; I can breathe the scent of sun-drying grasses, listen to the call of a chickadee, sniff a whiff of wild roses, and feel like I’m taking a country stroll in Indiana. 

 _{Wild Orchids}

As I walked today, I took photos of the glorious abundance of late summer.  The red, black, and white berries; the still flowering prairie; the way the light has changed clarity from its mid-summer haze. 

As I walked, the sky turned grey, and I calculated how long I had before the clouds lowered and opened up.  I searched the sky for the low-hanging gunmetal of rainclouds, and peered at the light to judge how dark it would get before the rain came.

And then I knew that I was truly a midwestern girl.  A girl who grew up with long horizons and big skies, a girl who knew how to read the weather by looking at the clouds.

A girl who timed it perfectly as she slid into her car as the first droplets began to fall.

text and photos copyright voicegal 2010