As I drive west on Interstate 94, there's a place where I suddenly feel like I'm home.
I've been in North Dakota since college, which I started in 2002. But at heart, I am and likely always will be a Montana girl.
I'm still more than 30 miles out of my hometown of Billings, Mont., when I hit the spot - the road curves and we start down a hill. To the north is the Yellowstone River. To the south is the rough-country pasture Dad and Grandpa rented when I was a little kid.
It's been years, decades actually, since our cows were in that pasture, but the memories that go along with it remain. It's where Grandpa convinced a tiny Jenny she could catch a wild turkey with the rope he fashioned from a piece of twine. Where, on the first and only time I got to ride my horse to check cows there, Dad and I tried to outrun a storm and ended up laughing hysterically when I fell awkwardly against my horse's neck when he took off galloping a little more enthusiastically than I was used to. Where we'd look for catfish in one of the wells. Where my uncle saw unmistakeable signs a mountain lion had recently been right where he was riding.
From the interstate, the pasture doesn't look like it's changed much. The owners decided to use it for themselves during a dry season years ago, so we haven't taken our cows back since. But it's still pleasant to see it staying relatively the same, a beautiful example of what the land used to look like before people and cities and houses.
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That can't be said for what lies ahead on our journey.
While there are memories and "I remembers" all along the road through North Dakota and Montana, the remembrances come faster on that last stretch of I-94 before I exit. And every time I go back, it gets a little harder to see how nothing has stayed the same.
As the communities in the area have grown, the farmland has shrunk. There still are quite a few farms, of course, but they seem to get smaller and smaller with every visit.
When I turn down my parent's road, in an area that once was considered "country" and now is basically the outskirts of Billings, the changes hit harder. The "I remembers" get more difficult to explain. It's hard to explain the hyjinx in the fields - knocking down 7-foot weeds with machetes in a sugar beet field, getting smacked in the eye with a corn stalk while picking sweet corn by the pickup load, my first time driving tractor - when the "fields" are now houses with manicured lawns.
It's not just fields that we used to farm. It's neighbors' fields and pastures, too. And I don't begrudge the owners their right to do what they want with their land. They could make more from selling plots than collecting rent. And American agriculture has more than picked up the slack for those little lost fields, producing more and more on each acre of land until those little fields probably don't matter much to the big picture.
But it's hard to watch how people who wanted to live in the country have, in doing so, turned the country into the suburbs. It's hard to watch a farm shrink a little more with every visit. Even in communities in which I've never lived, I hate to see the city infringe on the country.
Still, home is home, and I'm happy to report that my North Dakotan daughters have a little Montana in them, too. Because when we drove upon that special spot in a recent visit, where just for a moment the land looks a lot like it always has looked, my older kid shouted in excitement, without me saying a word, "That means we're almost there."
