The Llano Estacado from the Eye of a Native Daughter

I didn’t know there were boundaries along the road when I was a little girl traveling to visit grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. What child knows of state lines and county names? It was nothing to travel eighty or ninety miles for a movie. Distance was relative. On the Llano Estacado, you travel long distances to get anywhere. This want to photograph my memories of growing up on the High Plains stems from my need to connect with where I used to belong. Ken Taylor remarked in Landscape and Memory (2008), “One of our deepest needs is for a sense of identity and belonging. A common denominator in this is human attachment to landscape and how we find identity in landscape and place. Landscape therefore is not simply what we see, but a way of seeing: we see it with our eye but interpret it with our mind and ascribe values to landscape for intangible—spiritual—reasons. Landscape can therefore be seen as a cultural construct in which our sense of place and memories inhere.” Some think of West Texas as ugly, windy and isolated. When I look at the land, I see the beauty. I see my memories first and the scene in front of me second. As a native daughter, I see the landscape as a person who is looking back after leaving years ago. I do not see with fresh eyes but with misty eyes filled with emotion.