I lived in Iowa for 12 years, and absorbed that place with such land-love that now I carry it with me. My friend Dana Knighten, whose dearest love is the ocean, also lived in the Midwest for a time, and she writes:

Farmland.  Prairie and waving grasses and rounded, golden hills rippling in the wind and the sunlight.  A huge summer moon rising behind cottonwoods as I drive east past the city limits on a summer night.  I did not then appreciate the oceanic nature of the plains.

Here and now in Maryland, the days are miserably hot, hot, hot. Terrible storms, and reports of the hundreds of thousands of households without power three days later. This time I am not one of the ones spoken of in the news, and I am so thankful.