Photographs Capture Memories

While in Kansas recently, I got to return to the hometown of my mother; Fowler, Kansas. She grew up there, went through all of her years of school there, and her mother lived there until just a few years ago. And then when I was young, we went there fairly often. It was a few hours from where my other grandparents lived. So it was not out of the way to go visit. I had not been back there in nearly 15 years. And I had forgotten a lot about the icons, the look, feel and smell of a small wheat farming town in western Kansas. it was dry, windy, and flat for as far as you could see. And the looming grain elevators are visible for miles. I remember driving past the Fowler Equity grain elevator growing up, it was on the main road, the only road in or out of Fowler. When I saw it again on this last trip, it just struck me in a way I can't explain. It reminded me of all the trips into Fowler, and how it had not changed much, because Fowler had not changed much. I just had to take some pictures of it, I had to capture that memory, even though the picture will never convey what went on in my head when we drove past it. I don't know when I will ever go back to Fowler, maybe one day to show my children where my mother grew up, where my grandparents were laid to rest. But until then, I wanted to be able to capture that piece of my history, that part of my memories from my childhood. I am sure that none of the family in the car on that hot dusty road understood why I wanted to get out and trek out through a dusty field to take a picture of some old grain elevator. But I knew why.

The Fowler Equity Exchange and that which supports it. The second picture has so much more depth to it than I thought when I took it. The wheat almost feels like it is coming off the screen.