![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
After a long, hard winter, the sight of blooming forsythia can be intoxicating. And a butterfly? That must be just a fleeting dream.
My daughter spotted those things plus a robin soon after we arrived in Missouri for spring break, and they were enough to make her giddy with excitement.
"Oh, I like this place,'' she cried. "I like the way it looks, the warm spring air, the way it smells. And oh, look, some nice spring grass!''
Aside from its barbecue and jazz, most people know little about Kansas City.
But when I went there one April, I found much more than saxophones and spare ribs. Around every corner there are beautiful fountains, sculptures and tiers of flowers. There are blues and swing and folk in clubs open till 3 a.m. There are microbreweries and boiled crawfish by the pound and Cinderella carriages clopping through streets lined by Spanish haciendas.
And if you want something really exotic, the South is just outside its borders. That’s where people still call each other "Mr.’’ and "Mrs.’’ Where millions of pounds of tobacco are harvested each year. Where the War Between the States ruined a good thing, and those long-ago interlopers are called Yankee dogs.
Mansfield, Mo., has never been a particularly prosperous town. Lying in the heart of the Ozarks, its landscape is bucolic but barely fertile.
In 1894, however, a stream of people seeking better lives was flowing through this Gem City of the Ozarks, and among them was 27-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had traveled in a horse-drawn hack from De Smet, S.D., with her husband, Almanzo, and their daughter, Rose.
As a child, Laura had zigzagged across the Midwest with her family, dogged by failure. Her life with Almanzo seemed similarly
destined: Two years after they married, their barn barned. The next year, they contracted diphtheria, and Almanzo suffered a
stroke that crippled him for life.
Only a day’s drive to the south lies a world as old as the glacier-cut north woods are new.
Here, in the foothills of a worn-down mountain range, elephantine boulders stand in herds. In riverbeds, billion-year-old slabs are as slippery smooth as clay just pressed by a toddler’s thumb. Springs pop out of the Earth’s depths, shimmering as blue-green as the Caribbean.
This is what a volcanic landscape looks like after 1.5 billion years of continual erosion: very rocky and very rolling. There’s rarely enough topsoil to till, and locals eke out a simple living. The world of strip malls seems far away — in days of visiting state parks and historic sites, you may never see a single national franchise, just the mom-and-pop cafes and motels of yesteryear.