Returning to the prairie reconnects me to my own interior landscape. It's where I find images of my horse-trader grandpa jostling down dirt roads with a trailer and two Shetlands, the sound of corn rippling in the night wind in the field across the road, or a memory of a Saturday night long ago on Main Street where cars cruise the two-block spans over and over again in search of something they never find.

The following spring, I am back again on Main Street searching for familiar landmarks in the wake of destruction. I find few standing. One of my favorite structures, the old orange drive-in, is gone - not one orange board to be seen. Down the road, the elevator where my father hauled beans and corn hovers on the edge of town like a mangled metal monster. With my camera and rolls of film, I feel like a voyeur - or, worse yet, a tourist. I put the camera down and take off my sunglasses so that the people in town might recognize me as Agnes and Leo's daughter, not just a stranger here for the after-the-tornado sideshow that seems to attract a zillion cars.

There is a feeling of disequilibrium, of being off-balance, of having too much sky and air in front of you where there used to be structures to stop the view. There is a striking absence of green in a town stripped of its trees and leaves. I miss corners, look for houses that aren't there, and end up out of town when I think I have another block to go. Downtown, I dodge trucks hauling shattered pieces of buildings, as Caterpillars finish leveling another vacant lot nearby.

In their yards, people rake up debris and drag branches into piles. You don't have to look hard to see fragments of people's lives stripped of their privacy, lying vulnerable and visible all over town. There are dresser drawers and picture frames and table settings on lawns. If you look closely, you might see fragments of wedding dresses, photo albums, or dollar bills imbedded in the earth.

On the east side of town, someone has nailed a picture of Jesus to the outside of a house. A little farther down, a man stands on his driveway hugging a cat. Occasionally the work stops, and two or three people stand together in the center of a lawn leaning on their rakes and shovels, with looks of hope just barely overcoming the downward pull of despair. When I get to the block where the old schoolhouse stands mortally wounded, I see all the most dire implications of wind on the prairie summed up in one place.

Later, I sit on the hood of my car on Main Street in front of the empty lot that used to be Memorial Hall. I've been to dozens of wedding dances here and can almost hear the strains of a country-western band playing a love song for the bride and groom. If I listen closely, amidst the recent memory of swirling wind and the sound of an old structure giving in, I hear roller-skates smoothly taking corners to the strains of "Sail Along Silvery Moon." I am thirteen again, sitting on the sidelines with my friends. We are praying someone asks us to skate the couples skate. And when they don't, we sit there and wish hard that the couples skate gets over real soon and we can get back out on the floor.

Memories. Indelible spots on the brain even tornadoes can't banish. I stand on the corner of Main Street on a Saturday night. In the background is the Lutheran church, with its tall steeple shining in the glow of a street light and the cottonwoods around it rippling in the wind. I'm with my friend, Cherry. We are in our short, short skirts and our ratted hair and pink glow-in-the-dark nail polish. We wait for the wild boys from out of town, the ones with the souped-up cars and the Camels hanging so cleverly from their lips, to come cruising down the street.

I sit in my father's car in front of the old drive-in, where you look up to the stars and think the rest of the world is just as far away, but the ice cold root beer in your hand brings you back to now, it tastes that good. Wind can destroy a lot of things out on the prairie, even wound the spirit and take it to its knees. But often, in the act of retrieving memories etched so finely on the soul, we find it within ourselves to rebuild again.

Kathryn A. Cullen now lives in Northern California.