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Popcorn: The Only Grain That Performs

Last weekend, the village of North Loup, Nebraska, population somewhere around three hundred, threw its 125th Annual Popcorn Days. A carnival took over Highway 11 from Friday to Sunday. There was team penning and sorting, a turtle race, kids’ games, a juvenile parade, a men’s slow pitch tournament, sand volleyball, a street dance, and on Sunday the largest parade in the area to close the show. The theme this year was “Looking Back at 125 Years of Popcorn Days,” which is what happens when the anniversary becomes the headline: the parade turns into a mirror. II spent my childhood summers in North Loup with my grandfather, in a house where the television pulled in exactly one signal, channel 10/11, and where the calendar bent around one August weekend the way other towns bend around Christmas. The smell arrived before the event did. Hot oil, salt, the sweet dust hanging over the poppers. You could stand at the edge of town with your eyes closed and know what week it was.

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Return to the Braided Prairie: A 2024 North Loup Photo Memory

When I returned to North Loup, Nebraska this summer to bury my mother, I realized I hadn’t been back to that beautiful village for 40 years! It seemed impossible that I’d been away from the braided prairie for two generations! I discovered the last time I visited North Loup was in 1984 when I published a photo memory. Today, 14,600 days later, I present a new photo memory of the North Loup that raised me, and that lifted all the hopes of my curious childhood in far away in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Cathedrals of Chalk: Return to Happy Jack Mountain

There is a special place from my childhood called Happy Jack Mountain that I visit daily from New York City even though that Mountain resides more than 1,500 miles away near Scotia, Nebraska.

Afloat in the Flatlands
I travel to Happy Jack Mountain by closing my eyes and walking the winding trail of 234 railroad tie steps up to the 483 foot Peak that pinnacles 2,000 feet above sea-level.

This is the story of a time and place that will never change for me, for every time I visit Happy Jack Mountain, it is the Fall of 1969 when life was glittering and full of innocence and promise.

My existence was purely good and clean and I was four years old.

Nebraska is notorious for being flat.

In fact, “Nebraska” is the Oglala Plains Indian phrase for “Flatwater.”

The running joke is that Nebraska is 98% sky, 1% land and 1% manure.

Wind, Rain and Sunshine are the Holy Trinity that rule life upon Nebraska’s plains.

Nebraskans are known by some as “fly over folks” where people on either end of the nation only get to know us, our customs, and our dreams en passant as they arc over us in airplanes on their way to someplace bigger.

Continue reading → Cathedrals of Chalk: Return to Happy Jack Mountain