There’s just something about Indiana.

I can’t put it into words exactly–but it has something to do with the fields and the sky, the crumbling barns that line the roads, the McDonalds perched right on the edge of a cornfield. A feeling grips me as we’re driving through, watching the scattered farmhouses grow closer, loom, and then flash by. What are their lives like? I wonder. Could I live here, in the peace and quiet of the country?

These pictures move me. Not because they’re stellar pieces of photography, but because of the blue tones of the late evening light. The grass and the fences. And the silos. And the telephone wires strung across the sky, criss-crossing with the airplane trails.

Maybe I feel this way because I was born here. Came back to go to college. Fell in love here. Got married here.

I can do the East coast, and spent three happy but hard years in Newark, Delaware. I loved visiting the West coast and tramping about rainy Seattle. I love my surrogate home country of Spain, and cried the last time I saw its dry landscape rise up under me as the plane landed. And I adored my time studying abroad in Paris, with whole days spent wandering through its streets, half-lost but completely unconcerned, knowing that I would stumble across a Metro stop at some point.

But Midwestern America . . . it has me by the heartstrings.

I don’t know what the future holds, and I’ve learned that I can be happy anywhere–but I do know that this landscape stirs my heart and always will.