In praise of a city bobbing on a prairie sea

By JoAnne Young

Lincoln has been in my life, off and on, from my teenage years. 

 

At 18, it was the city down a bumpy roadway with odd high schools, one that had no windows and another where cheerleaders wore funny plaid tams. 

 

At 20, it was city campus where I learned that many of my previous ideas about the world didn’t fit anymore. That I could agree to disagree with opinions I had been raised on, from a more informed position. 

 

At 22, it was a city I had to leave to find out if it made sense to ever come back.

 

At 31, I did come back with a husband and three kids in tow. Family life and work ensued and Lincoln blurred. It became a collection of objects and buildings and pavement and landmarks that rushed by as I drove to schools and work and appointments and grocery stores. 

 

In midlife, I sat for days and days in an office on P Street and then at the state Capitol, occasionally looking up through a high window at the big sky, daydreaming for a minute about what the city would hold in a deeper look, through my eyes, not those of politicians and newsmakers and employers. 

 

Now I’ve left the office and the Capitol and the tasks that kept the city at arm’s length. And I am starting to drift out of that hazy mechanical routine to notions of how to get from one phase of being to the next. 

 

And things are clearing up. 

Credit a camera lens that can bring into focus the details of what surrounds us: those things you barely notice in cityscapes and landscapes, details that get lost in the emotions, thoughts and images that obscure them.

So this is Lincoln, from Chief Standing Bear on Centennial Mall, to the early morning mist on Holmes Lake, the picturesque staircases in downtown’s historic buildings, and the iconic quotes on the arena pedestrian bridge. 

 

It grounds us with the familiar, but then we look up and there is something we’ve never seen: an exotic wall mural on a University Place building, a red glow from a city campus cupola, intricate scaffolding surrounding the Capitol sower, a tabby cat gazing sleepily from a bookstore window. 

 

It offers us a quality of life and cares about us, every one. A diverse governing body with a woman at the helm warrants a “Thank you, Lincoln voters.” No mountains or oceans, but distinctive seasonal changes and color splashed skies that ward off boredom. It isn’t without its flaws. But those imperfections are up to us to fix. Together.

 

Lincoln is the prairie fringed orchid in this expanse of grassland, the purple stitch across the divisive politics of our state. 

 

It’s those details, always evolving, that make it so.