The first time I saw North Dakota, I followed my husband through a blizzard.  The temperature in Fargo registered about minus seventy degrees with the wind chill factor.   The roads were icy.  My baby was screaming, and my hands were knotted around the steering wheel so tightly they ached.

Twice during that move, my husband’s truck slid off the road.  Once the U-Haul trailer he was pulling jack-knifed and hit both sides of the truck, spinning him around on the freeway until he faced oncoming traffic.  Both times, I almost ran into him.

But we arrived at our new home just fine.  During the next few years, we experienced tornado watches and blizzards and the flooding of 1997.  We got a dog, and my baby turned into a child. 

Occasionally, my dad would call.  “I don’t know how you can stand the weather up there,” he’d say, and we would explain how it really was.  Winters meant cocoa and snowmen and lots of people racing across the glistening white on snowmobiles.  Summers were beautiful, bright green times when we walked nearly everywhere we went for the simple joy of being outside.  And summers were hot, at least as hot as our desert birthplaces. 

For about three years, we lived in Walhalla, just a few miles south of the Canadian border.   Then we moved back to the desert state we came from.  

We couldn’t stay.  Two years later, we moved back to North Dakota.  We bought a house.  We made friends.  And we have never regretted making our home here.

In fact, we love it.  And that is really the purpose of this blog–to show what lies beyond the illusion of stormy weather.  It’s all about the land, the cultures, the politics and thriving businesses, the innovative people and the sturdy rural towns, the history, the artists.  I have to share my curiousity about a land that I keep falling in love with.

For some people, the story of our first move to North Dakota may be the only type of story they’ve heard about the state.  Unfortunately for them, these kind of stories are misleading.  Once my dad told my husband it was cold and raining at his house three states southwest of us.  The temperature in Bismarck was well over one hundred degrees.

“I don’t know how you can stand the weather down there,” my husband commented.

Then we went out and watered the flowers.