Cloud County

Taste the Journey of the Cloud County Tea Company

The journey has been swift, but not always smooth, for co-owners Johnita Crawford and Lorraine Palmer. However, their Cloud County Teas offered a quiet moment along the way.

The Future for Rural Kansas

The headlines today do not seem to have much faith in the future of rural Kansas. If we based Kansas’s future on the predictions of the news media, Globalization will take over rural Kansas and no one will live here anymore. However, I disagree with what the commentators and reporters say. I think that the Kansas that I have grown up in will continue to thrive for several reasons.

No Place Like Home

A common perception is that when young people graduate they leave town and never look back, swapping parochial backwaters for the glitz and glamor of big cities. They disappear Out There, by which rural folk mean the greater world, a distant city or a megalopolis stitched to a coastline. East or West, they’re one and the same. A smaller number, a fraction really, head Over There, which once meant Great Britain and Europe and countries with strange names and languages nobody at home could speak; and an even smaller number slip off Down Under, which is about as far as one can go from Kansas and still remain on the planet.

A Spot of Tea and Huckleberry Bread

A friend and I traveled to Concordia to attend the Taste of Home Cooking School at Cloud Community College in October. It was an evening event so we went early to tour the National Orphan Train Complex and to check out the shops. After a morning of learning about Ann Harrison, Edith Peterson, and other children who traveled the “orphan trains” to Concordia, we were starting to get hungry, but put it off to visit some of the shops. Not able to put up with hunger pains any longer, I asked an owner of an antique store, “Where do the locals go to eat?”