![]() ![]() This loss prompts Hoffert to take a break from the city and spend a harvest season at her family’s farm. ![]() Meanwhile, as time passes, her hometown continues to lose more buildings to decay, growing to resemble the mouth of an old woman missing teeth. ![]() When the farmers ask if she’s found a “fella,” rather than explain that- actually-she dates women, she stops breathing and changes the subject. The prairie is a hard place to stay-particularly if you are gay, and your home state is the last to know.įor Hoffert, returning home has not been easy. Like most rural kids, she followed the out-migration pattern to a better life. A land where she imagines standing at the bottom of the ancient lake that preceded the prairie: crop rows become the patterned sand ripples of the lake floor trees are the large alien plants reaching for the light and the sky is the water’s vast surface, reflecting the sun. Melanie Hoffert longs for her North Dakota childhood home, with its grain trucks and empty main streets. A rural expatriate’s struggle to reconcile family, home, love, and faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people ![]()
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