What the hell happened to my life?
My inner monologue was deafening in the stillness of the Nebraska morning. I hadn’t heard myself this clearly since high school five years ago, before I pushed off into life as an actress in New York City. I couldn’t be sure what made my thoughts so loud—maybe it was whiplash, my abrupt move from filming HBO’s High Maintenance to my childhood stomping grounds. Maybe it was my COVID summer survival job with Monsanto: hitching a port-a-potty to the back of a rusting F-150 and trailing a school bus full of 14-year-old detasselers from one cornfield to the next. Maybe it was dying pride, or growing pain. Maybe it was that, at 5:17 a.m., the sun was beginning to lull the earth back into color, refracting in the beads of dew and then burning them away, disinfecting things, somehow speaking both to the entire world and just to me.
Maybe it was my own roots, boring down into freshly friable soil. Or that, in spite of myself, I was growing to love this place. Whatever it was, it was acutely painful.
I was born in Omaha in the late ’90s. Mom’s difficult labor coincided with a tree-shredder storm, Dad remembers, where ice glazed trees and telephone lines until they broke under its weight. Grandpa Jack had only just gotten sick. He and Grandma drove home from the hospital on the windiest day in state history, and were stranded in Lincoln by 30-mph winds, the rifle shots of snapping branches, and the shatter of cold glass.
Tom Osborne was still head coach of the Huskers then, working his way to a 60-3 record over his last five seasons. The world’s first IVF “test-tube” gorilla had just been transferred to the Henry Doorly Zoo in south Omaha. A 16-year-old Conor Oberst was hand-distributing Bright Eyes cassettes at Creighton Prep, an all-boys Jesuit school in the center of town. Warren Buffett was finalizing Berkshire Hathaway’s acquisition of GEICO, and introducing shares of Berk-B to manage his stock prices.
As we grew, Mom read us books on my parents’ big bed every night. Our favorites were The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—I made her read Aslan’s death over and over again—Anne of Green Gables, and, of course, Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. At prairie school, a summer camp for children in the middle of the state, we pretended to be Mary and Laura, learning to make play stilts from string and empty blueberry cans and to churn strawberry ice cream (Grandpa’s favorite) from scratch.
We went to the graves of early settlers, the pioneers who came west under the Homestead Act of 1862, and who built lives here out of daring and hope and hard labor on land that had long been home to the Omaha, Pawnee, Ponca, and Otoe-Missouria peoples. We learned to start fires and also how people survived them, burying themselves in wet cloth when the flames moved faster than a girl could run. We learned how fires burned the chaff but did not kill the prairie grasses, which could push their roots as deep as 10 feet into the soil.
I remember once seeing the wind part the field straight down the middle in a tacit invitation. I wanted to do what Willa Cather described in My Ántonia, to walk through it and over the edge of the world, to be part of whatever exciting, infernal thing must be happening down there.
Grandpa Jack died around the turn of the millennium, before the towers came down. He was one of many men in his neighborhood to succumb to bladder cancer, which we think was linked to drinking water contaminated with fertilizer runoff. It was Thanksgiving Day, which I remember because of the bulletin board full of paper handprint turkeys. The whole family gathered at the hospital. Mom prayed with him, and he accepted Christ. My cousin Haley, then 6 years old, said she saw his heavenly body ascend from his earthly one, “up through the ceiling and away.” People came from other states for the funeral. Students from his teaching days sent condolences and handwritten letters. Many were wayward kids he’d given jobs to, working in his bee yard. My dad gave the eulogy, and seeing him struggle to speak pierced me with discomfort and affection.
I don’t want to give the mistaken impression that I grew up in the country—in fact, in 2003, we moved into an old red brick house on Izard street, half a mile away from Warren Buffett’s childhood home. Dundee, our neighborhood, was one of Omaha’s early streetcar suburbs, developed in the first decades of the 20th century as the city expanded outward from its railroad and riverfront core. It was designed for middle- and upper-middle-class families who could reach downtown by trolley, and retains much of its original housing stock to this day. It wasn’t uncommon to see Buffett drive by in his Honda Accord with LeBron James in the passenger seat, or to bump into him and Paul McCartney eating ice cream at our neighborhood spot.
Our house had, in a stroke of strange luck, been used as a set for Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt. Kathy Bates had eaten breakfast in our dining room, and Jack Nicholson had peed all over our bathroom. A location scout had plucked it out of obscurity for its old-world charm—or, in other words, because it hadn’t been updated since the 1950s. Carpets blanketed nearly every floor. The stove floated inexplicably in the center of the kitchen. Time, it seemed, had stalled in there.
The house was ours to reckon with. Renovations were DIY—a few times, we slept on the dining room floor in sleeping bags and ate out of coolers while we worked. The living room was covered in four layers of wallpaper, which we softened with vinegar water and scraped off with metal spatulas. When we finally demolished the kitchen to uncover the house’s “lovely bones,” as my dad liked to say, the house gave up its secrets: artifacts and original blueprints hidden in the walls.
Over the years, the house became a friend. We knew when the lilacs would bloom, when Dad’s garden would start to offer its herbs and summer tomatoes, what the hallway corners smelled like in heat and in cold. I knew where to pull on the handrail so it wouldn’t sway, which steps would give me up on a midnight trip to the kitchen, and where the secret messages were kept—like the “I Love Grace” painted in lime green on the back wall of my closet.
The days were full and fertile. Violin lessons, dance classes, theater productions, track practices, and AP classes at our school just down the block. I was excelling but also itching. Omaha was pressing in around me like a sweater two sizes too small. When I left the University of Michigan, my mom took my face in her hands. “You were born for leaving,” she said, and kissed my forehead.
I didn't always miss Nebraska while I was studying in Ann Arbor or during my first years in New York City, but sometimes waves of homesickness would swell and overtake me unexpectedly—when a cousin bought a house or had a baby, or Mom celebrated a birthday. When I smelled lilacs at the dog park, or when Grandpa Jack’s delighted face returned to me at the first bite of strawberry ice cream in Williamsburg.
And then, in 2020, New York City shut down and the God I’d recently come to know brought me home against my will. I stayed for a few weeks with my grandma, whose house was closer to the Monsanto fields. She pulled out boxes of family pictures that had been taken from Grandpa’s woodshop: one of Dad holding me in the hospital, a cross over his left shoulder and a giant clock like a half-moon looming over his right. She never slept. By the time I woke each day at 3:30 a.m., she’d made my coffee and my lunch, and had read half the daily paper.
The kids who had worked this job every summer for years taught me about corn—when a field should lay fallow and when it should be tilled, how to suck the sugar from the base of the husk, the names for the different tassels they pulled: sparklers, candlesticks, stickers, hangers, buggy whips. They knew the male from the female, which plants needed to be pruned in order to grow. They knew that a month or two later, they’d be back in the fields to “rogue,” cutting down with a sickle the plants that rose too far above the rest.
For the first time in six years, I attended weekly family dinners and church with my parents. I saw one cousin propose, held another’s new baby, and watched yet another buy a house. I brought cupcakes to my voice teacher and her husband, my cross-generational friends, plucking stories from the annals of their minds. I read My Ántonia for the first time since childhood: “That is happiness;” Cather wrote, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
One early morning on my last week of work, the kids handed me a netted hat and a pair of gloves. “What’s this for?” I asked.
“Cornfield baptism,” one said, and smiled. “Walk the row. It’s a rite of passage.”
Though I’d trailed the kids in the truck for weeks, I hadn’t yet joined them on foot in the field. As I kicked through the grasshoppers clinging to their blades, the field opened before me in a tacit invitation. Beads of dew slipped from the husks and clung to my clothes until I’d been drenched to the skin. The sun surfaced slowly over the corn, disinfecting things, speaking to the whole world, and just to me.
Grace Salvatore is a Nebraskan writer and administrator based in New York City.
Instagram: @grace_daley
Published in the Dispatch on May 16th, 2026