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“Our Turn at this Earth” airs every Thursday at 6:44 pm CT on KANZ.
In the mid-1980s my father got a letter from the Kansas Water Office warning that, from then on, farmers who didn’t report their annual water use would be fined. This was long before our Groundwater Management District began requiring meters on irrigation wells, so we would have to extrapolate the amount of water we’d pumped that year from utility bills for the natural gas that powered our five well engines.
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs every Thursday at 6:44 pm CT on KANZ.
🔈Listen here: High Plains Public Radio
In the mid-1980s, when I returned to western Kansas after a sixteen year absence, I was shocked by the changes irrigation had brought to our once dry-land wheat farm. Many of the wheat fields and pastures of my childhood had been replaced by irrigated corn.
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs every Thursday at 6:44 pm CT on KANZ (High Plains Public Radio).
Those who, like myself, leave the places where they grew up at a young age almost always think they will never look back. But they almost always do. In my case, the inevitable look back began after I’d been living in San Francisco for eight years. Camping trips in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Mojave Desert reawakened me to the outdoor life I’d had as a child.
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs every Thursday at 6:44 pm CT on KANZ (High Plains Public Radio).
As a young girl, I resented the gender divisions on my family’s Kansas farm, where my brothers worked in the barn and fields and I was relegated to cooking, gardening and cleaning the house with my mom. Today I realize that all of our work contributed equally to our thriving in that place,
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs every Thursday at 6:44 pm CT on KANZ (High Plains Public Radio).
As a young woman, newly single after my marriage had ended, I bought a little one-bedroom Victorian in an unassuming, foggy San Francisco neighborhood. That house would be worth a fortune today. But I was young then. I didn’t think about my financial security in the distant future.
