FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 10, 1999

Home is what you miss when

you go away from it. I remember the family trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota when I was about eleven years old. Our first stop for a picnic lunch in the dry winds of South Dakota - the bread of our sandwiches dried to hard crusts before we could eat them. Already my mother was homesick for the farm. She persevered with us - we did get to see Mount Rushmore, but not for long, then we were homeward bound. We had to be. She was "homesick for the chickens." I remember the drive home, my following a curve of road that seemed like it went for a hundred miles; we'd never seen such spaces. Where were the trees? The rest of us, maybe, wanted to get home by then.

Perhaps our younger daughter inherited that propensity. In autumn of 1976 we moved from Milwaukee to Fairwater. A new place, a new house, a new life. Jessica was about two years old then, just tall enough to reach up and rattle the knob on the kitchen door, rattle the knob and try to open the heavy door, rattle the knob and try to get out of the house. She was ready - "Home, now," she said. "Home now." Fairwater wasn't home to her yet - home was still in Milwaukee.

Again this morning, the first time in a while, no dew on the windshield of the pick-up. A thin haze against some blueness overhead.

A squirrel runs the peak of the neighbor's roof.

At the cemetery on the north edge of Fairwater, the U.S. flag and the Wisconsin flag hang limp. Not enough breeze to move them.

Waste water from the canning factory is being sprayed against this morning, north of the village, east side of the road. A full mile north of Fairwater a John Deere tractor is being headed south. It belongs to the canning factory; the driver has just finished spreading solid wastes on a piece of field. A mile and a half north, I meet another canning factory tractor. The driver waves as he always does. He has just spread some thick liquid wastes on the strip of field to the west near the hawk's tree.

The sun has climbed above a bank of clouds to the east. I noticed the warmth on my arm before I saw the increase of light in the sky. Corn stubble stands in sharp relief in the brightness.

At Five Corners, the colors of flowers, many flowers, many colors - red and white and purple and rose and orange and gold, and some heads closed up so I cannot see their color.

A lazy crow flaps slowly above Ripon's down town area. Go, Crow!

Yesterday's clouds brought some rain in the afternoon. I wonder whether today's clouds will bring more?