Minnesota Prairie Roots

An abandoned building near Nerstrand, Minnesota.

IT IS THE ABSENCE of color. White. Pervasive now in the Minnesota landscape, as one would expect in March.

The whiteness of the southern Minnesota countryside overwhelms vision. Snow layers the land, rooftops, roadways, seemingly every surface. It takes effort to focus on something, anything, beyond the white.

A much-needed Sunday afternoon drive through rural Rice County provided an opportunity to shift my thinking away from this interminable winter of too much brutal cold and too much snow. Yet, my thoughts never really drifted away from winter. How could they when wind swept snow across the roadway, sometimes finger-drifting drifts?

How could my thoughts wander to spring when everywhere I saw winter?

How could I escape winter when I observed ditches filled with snow to road level?

This drive wasn’t accomplishing what I’d hoped—a temporary alleviation of cabin fever. Who was I fooling? Only a vacation to a warmer climate or a weekend get-away to a hotel could deliver that. Neither will happen.

East of Northfield, Minnesota.

Realizing that, I tried harder to embrace the winter scenery. My camera allows me to reshape my thinking, to view the world through a different lens. To see beyond the colorless to the color. A red barn.

A flash of yellow in a road sign.

Blue sky backdrops a farm site near Nerstrand, Minnesota.

A blue sky.

Mailboxes protrude from banked snow in Dundas, Minnesota.

With camera in hand, I began to notice the details—to see art-wrapped mailboxes embedded in a snow bank,

Snowmobiling near Nerstrand.

a snowmobiler powering through winter,

power poles penciling horizontal lines over blank fields.

And when I saw all of that, the poetry of winter overwrote the absence of light, of all that white.

Note: All images have been edited with an artsy editing tool.

© Copyright 2019 Audrey Kletscher Helbling