She recalled her family, and marveled at how much had changed.Īnd she remembered neighbors: the ones who asked if she found a “fella” yet corn farmers homesteaders and homemakers caretakers of the land. She remembered how Jessica led her to Jesus, and the turmoil it created when she was told that homosexuality was a sin. That sort of thing just wasn’t done.Ĭoming home to North Dakota, she remembered that puppy love. Hoffert knew she couldn’t talk about that to anyone on the prairie. She dreamed of holding hands with a woman, and she became smitten with her best high school friend, Jessica. She knew at a young age that she was different from other girls: she figured she’d eventually kiss a boy, but she yearned for another kind of love. She wanted to touch the past.īut in reconnecting with memories of vast openness and the kind of silence that comes when neighbors are miles apart, Hoffert also rediscovered who she was, years ago. So she took a leave of absence from the job she loved. She loathed small-town life then but, sitting in a cold office in Minneapolis, she realized how much she missed the farm and, most of all, harvest time. She’d hated growing up on an isolated farm in North Dakota, ten miles from grocery stores, three miles from playmates, a half-days’ drive to a major city. Hoffert surprised herself with her longing for home. It may have seemed like the kind of idle conversation that friends have when they’ve known one another for ages, but Melanie Hoffert was dead serious when she told her friend, Melissa, that they should return together to the prairie.
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