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February, 2008
𝕱OR THE PAST THIRTY-FOUR YEARS, Mrs. Vargas of Blue Valley Elementary's esteemed staff has been assigning her first-grade students the exact same homework task. A rite of passage for every child that passes through the school's halls, it is often the first homework assignment these children ever receive.
Draw a picture of home.
Mrs. Vargas, bless her soul, believes the task is easy enough to complete, for there are only so many kinds of families in Blue Valley, and these kinds of people, these kinds of children, breed the same kind of answers: a house, a fence. A heart, a home.
Occasionally, a pet. (Dogs, Mrs. Vargas has found, more than cats.)
The woman has hundreds of these drawings, perhaps even thousands. Her decades-long tenure at Blue Valley Elementary has been immortalised in illustration; her classroom is plastered with picture after picture, each one without fail depicting a house in bright, wax-crayon colour. Generation after generation has contributed to Mrs. Vargas' walls. The now white-haired woman has taught half the town, becoming a common thread in the tapestry of thousands of lives.
You can ask any Blue Valley native about that assignment—about their home. They'll smile fondly and reminisce, if only for a moment. In a town like this, everything and everyone eventually connects. Genealogy is not found in blood, but instead traced through stories told between friends and memories shared. Mrs. Vargas' first-grade class is one of these stories, these memories, and so is her assignment.
Draw a picture of home. First, you must know what—and where—home is.
The easy answer is your house—this is the answer Mrs. Vargas often expects when she asks that question, and it is the answer she often receives. There are only so many ways a child can draw a house. You know the sitch: a simple box with a triangular roof filled with loopy lines serving as tiles. There's a four-panelled window—or two—and a door, and maybe a picket fence if the child in question has artistic tendencies (or well-to-do parents.) There are always variations in colour—unrealistic ones—like blue walls, pink doors, purple roofs, but underneath the embroidery, the message can be found. This is home—at least, this is what I want it to be.
This is home. This is mine.
The assignment is easy. After all, it is for children. It is a simple question—where is home?—and it should have a simple answer.
Lark Lennox has many talents—singing, figure skating, saving the day. Somewhere in that litany is her ability to make things needlessly complicated.
She has never known when, nor how, to stop.
Technically speaking, home is the elementary school's titular Blue Valley, a small town of four thousand in north-eastern Nebraska about twenty-five miles out from Sioux City in South Dakota. Founded in 1862 by a Connecticut settler named Cornelius Blue, there wasn't much to say about Blue Valley. It was cut into two, nearly-even halves by a railroad constructed shortly after the town was founded; the railroad connected Blue Valley first to its twin, Claire—an agricultural township a half-hour away, founded a few years earlier in 1858—then to the rest of the state. Blue Valley and Claire, sisters stranded underneath the endless sky, held to each other by these tracks, those ribbon-like arteries pumping life through the plains that both towns had combatted in the process of their creation.
