Excerpt from Mishaps & Nebraska Mementos

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Mishaps and Nebraska Mementos
(An excerpt, full article available here)

By Kendra Liedle

Sometimes you have to leave a place to really appreciated the things that make it special. Most of the time, the things you discover, and ultimately miss, are some of the simplest things in life.

I miss the autumn leaves, the first snow of the year, thunderstorms, the big sky, the clean air, the cornfields and the open spaces. I like the fact that there is only one freeway and that it isn’t even a freeway at all. To Nebraskans, it’s just I-80. I miss the electricity in the air during tornado warnings. I miss basements. For me, only by leaving and coming back to Nebraska could I experience all of these things and more with a child’s sense of wonderment.

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I now realize that Nebraska – that sense of place and experience cannot be captured, packaged up, and tied with a bow. Maybe that’s what keeps bringing me back.

KL, Copyright 2007, Nebraska Life Magazine

They Kidnapped My APPLE BUTTER!

About this time last year, I was sloshing around in the rain with my grandmother and my mom at Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City. We could’ve done it another day, but that’s the thing about short visits ~ before you’ve even arrived, you realize that time you haven’t even lived yet has already been eaten away.

The other part of it was my stubbornness. Blame it on my heavy German-Russian blood and my inherent pioneer spirit, but I was determined to go to Arbor Day Farm and I was going to do it that day.

What’s a little rain?

I just happened to drag both my mom and my grandmother into this little “Apple” daydream of mine.

For some reason in all of this, I’d become fixated on apple butter.

“Must buy apple butter in Nebraska City,” my mind kept telling me.

I think part of it was just my oddly growing nostalgia for all things Nebraskan, particularly the trees and the apples and the whole experience of autumn in the Midwest.

So, I was not happy when TSA Security at Eppley Airfield confiscated my apple butter, claiming that it fell into “gel or liquid” territory.

(Yeah, it also happens to be really, really good!)

However, I approach every setback as an opportunity to tell a great story later.

The kidnapping of my apple butter that cold, rainy Nebraska day has been recounted in a piece I wrote: Mishaps and Nebraska Mementos, published in this month’s Nebraska Life Magazine.