A prairie childhood, where danger and wonder lived side by side.
My very first memory—the very first picture that lives in my mind—is as sharp as a Kodachrome slide.
I am barely a year and a half old, standing in the kitchen that opened onto the carport. I’m in little white eyelet panties, ruffles brushing my legs, my round belly sticking out. My mother’s hand grips my arm, steady and firm, before she even touches the door handle. We are standing in safety, but she is teaching me the process—how to find danger before stepping into it.
She cracks the storm door, just enough for us to see. Together we look down. First below the threshold. Then the stoop. Then the concrete slab beyond.
Wait. Look first.
I can still see myself bent almost double, nose to knees, peering through that narrow crack. At not quite two years old, I was already being taught that danger was something you could look for, step by step, if you paid attention.
We lived at the bottom of the One-Mile Hill, with rattlesnakes thick in the rocky ledges above us. In the heat of summer, they came drifting down to stretch themselves across the cool carport concrete. You could smell them before you ever saw them—a sharp, sour stink that carried its own kind of warning.
From the time we could walk, this was the ritual. Threshold. Stoop. Concrete. Always look. Always respect. That was life on the prairie. Not fear—respect.
Sometimes, after one had been killed, we were pulled close. We were shown the flat head. The diamond scales. The dry little cluster of rattlers at the tail. Our parents wanted us to know exactly what we were living with.
By the time I was three and my sister was a year and a half, she was right there beside me. Two little girls leaning forward together—bellies bare, ruffles at our legs—pausing at the stoop as if our whole lives depended on what was waiting underneath. Then came the moment of release: no snake, only the drone of cicadas, only heat shimmering at the carport’s edge. We were free to tumble out into the wide world, to grow and to play, our laughter carrying across the prairie where danger and delight lived side by side.
That first memory explains something about me. It left me unafraid. I believed danger would always show itself, if you knew the steps to look for it. A rattle. A smell. A sign. Something to warn you, something you could step back from.
But human danger doesn’t work that way. It comes smiling, cloaked in charm, silent as shadow. No rattle, no smell, no sign. I had no idea—none whatsoever.
Even when I did sense it, shame kept me from closing the door and calling for help. Shame told me to stay quiet, to bear it, to believe it was somehow my fault. The prairie had taught me that danger could be dealt with if you named it, if you fetched a parent, if you let someone stronger eliminate the threat. Shame stole that wisdom from me. It left me alone with the unseen dangers no one had warned me about.
That’s why my very first memory matters. It’s not just a snapshot of a toddler in eyelet panties bending nose to knees at the door. It is the foundation of how I understood the world: that danger could be anticipated and respected—but also the beginning of why I struggled later, when silence and shame tangled themselves around dangers that wore human faces.
That’s the thread of Bones Beneath the Prairie. Beauty and danger, side by side. The rattlesnakes gave me fair warning. The human dangers did not.
Sometimes courage looks like two little girls pausing at the stoop until the way is clear. Other times it looks like a grown woman, years later, finally naming the dangers no one ever warned her about—and walking toward the light anyway.