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The sky is a clean, hard blue, and the fields are a clean, hard green, stretching down to the muddy brown line of the creek. The darker green treeline forms a crisp, jagged border with the sky. The grey fieldstone and peeling red paint of farm buildings break up the purity of the green, just as the stern white clouds break up the blue.

There is a wonderfully expected, unsubtle beauty about this place - the beauty of things that are so entirely what they are. The sky is as blue as possible, without shadings and without haze, and that is its glory. The fields are long rectangles of uniform green, succeeding one another without pause, and that is their glory. Everything, from the clouds to the fireflies, belongs to its place. It is not a stark land, but it is sturdy, without excess. It must be, to survive winter undeformed.

The people of this land are like it: just what they appear to be, only more so. Straightforward, hearty, impatient with nonsense. Hard-working Monday to Friday and drunk on Saturday. Full of summer but hard against winter.

For four years, I kept cheese curds in my fridge, and my dorm keys on a Green Bay Packers keychain, to remind myself that this is where I belong. But now that I am here, what do this land and I have in common? I devise complications within complications; nothing is straightforward, for me. How can I explain myself to the clean, hard sky, let alone to the farmer down the road?