The fields were wide and grassy
and warm enough
(with sunlight filtering through the long brown grass stems)
for me to be a little pioneer girl
lost on an open prairie
the breeze whipping my cotton dress
around my ankles.
And yet they were steep
and barren enough
(with dark fir trees rising into the thin blue air)
for me to be a solitary mountaineer
wild, alone and free.
And I was lonely in them
and scared, and brave in them
and joyful, and sad in them
and I changed in them -
So that when I came back,
my mother was not just my mother
my father was more than a father
my brothers and sisters were something much more -
They were the family in the covered wagon
the cottagers on the mountainside
a closed space in the great vastness.
But I was separate and different
on the outside looking in.