I have long held the belief that there are two kinds of people– Sky People and Tree People. I began this theory our first year of living on the road, as we crisscrossed the United States from Appalachia to desert to the northern woods to ocean. Which category you identify with isn’t necessarily indicative of where you were born, though it can. My Someone was born in desert with wide skies, but feels more comfortable under a canopy of trees. I was born in the thick woods of Western Pennsylvania, and too much time spent on the prairie or in the desert makes my dreams go wonky and my vigilance heighten to a dull scream in the back of my mind until I quiet it again with a blend of deciduous and evergreen.

I’ve tested this theory on lots of people through the years. My friend Sherry nearly lost her mind living in the woods of Tennessee. She felt nervous, depressed, unlike herself until she finally moved back West to a town barely over the Mexican border in Southern Arizona. When I visited her there, it was like meeting an enhanced version of the person I already loved.

Most times when I present this theory, people instantly attach themselves to one or the other, except the holdouts that claim they love mountains and ocean equally. Shave it down to where they’d live the rest of their lives, though, and they can usually answer automatically, no looking back. Sky people need to feel the space above them, see for miles. Tree people need the safety of an overhang, to feel sheltered. Both, I’ve presumed, are about safety. My mother-in-law, while she claims to have a heart for New England, is frankly creeped out by the trees. Her mind swirls with all sorts of headless horsemen and hidden monsters in the shadowy leaves. I believe her to be a Sky Person– one who can see the distant Sierra Nevada mountain range atop the low grape vines and orange trees, an unimpeded sunset each night. My own mother, while she likes the occasional visit to the ocean, inevitably feels overexposed in a desert setting, and much prefers the cool constant rustle of a thick forest for her daily walk.

I solidified this understanding of people over time and experimentation and interview. And when, after a decade, I finally submitted the theory to fact in my personal catalog, I met Anne Muree. We just finished playing a perfect show on a May Sunday where the weather was clear and warm enough to be outside but cool enough for one sweater, too early for mosquitoes, and the joy of a people welcoming in the spring surrounded by blooms and green was palpable. We played with our whole hearts, and were rewarded with an enthusiastic audience that took the time to talk afterward. The yard was nearly cleared out when Anne Muree approached me, clasping her two hands around mine and delighting audibly in the afternoon we shared. From the stage, I’d told the group that we’d spent our weekend in North Dakota, playing a grueling late night gig next to an axe throwing tournament. I cannot resist poking the bear of regional disputes. Around these parts, North Dakota is decidedly the butt of the joke. So I’d taken a couple of light hearted swings.

Anne was in good humor about the digs, and confessed she’d grown up in North Dakota. Fascinated, I asked her more questions– what’s the primary industry aside from oil? (surprisingly, the answer is sugar beets); when did she leave? (years ago); does she miss it? (no). But the last question came with some reservation, and she expounded–

“Everything I am, all the gratitude I live, I owe to growing up in North Dakota,” she said firmly, with a touch of sentiment. I laughed, thinking it was with irony and a dose of eye rolling. But she shook her head, “No, no– really. I owe it to North Dakota.”

North Dakota winters, she explained, are the fiercest in our country. The cold is so bitter, so grievously bone deep with wind that has nothing to stop it from finding every crack and crevice in your home. You cannot imagine a cold more desolate, more despairing than the way it rests on the flat, treeless landscape. But then, in the summer, the heat is pressing. No shade or mountain breezes, no break between the sun and the dry, cracked ground beneath you. The ground barely recovers before dawn each day, when the swelter begins with first light.

“You do not know the pain of the elements until you have lived in North Dakota,” Anne said. And then, she told me that the first time she moved down South and experienced air conditioning, she cried. Not the pretty welling up in the eyes, but outright wept. And she was so grateful in that moment to that stifling North Dakota heat for the opportunity to appreciate the relief of cold air amid the putrid pressing of the South Carolina heat. She told me this with no ounce of regret, no twinge of bitterness. Her appreciation was full, calibrated, honest. “I just love that place,” she said, “And let me tell you about the sky.”

The sky, she went on, was endless, vast, unfathomably wide. There was not a barrier to be found between herself and the endless up. And for this, North Dakota not only taught her gratitude, but taught her boundaries– that there were none.

“I would look up into that sky and I just knew, it taught me, that there was nothing– absolutely nothing— that was keeping me from being or doing whatever it is I wanted to be or do. There were no limits.”

This was my opening, my moment to impress her with my solidified theory of the kinds of people there were in this world, but when I opened my mouth, Anne Muree began to tell a story that has humbled me from my measly attempts of fitting people neatly into categories. It is a story that puts no harness on the wildness of the world, makes no attempts to make sense of inevitable brutality, and yet convinced me to see what Anne sees in those wide North Dakota skies. It is the story of Anne Muree’s grandmother.

The day after I met Anne, I awoke with a sudden pain in my left hand– a sharp pain that twinged down my pinky at usual tasks that caught me in a gasp and made me pull back. I chocked it up to sleeping funny, to long days in the car, to skipping out on my usual length of yoga in favor of falling into bed earlier. I got myself back on schedule, committing to the routine of longer stretching, less inflammatory food, and getting plenty of rest. It didn’t work. The pain got worse, until a week in, I was losing sensation in my hand as I played ukulele. I needed help.

I saw a couple of occupational therapists and a massage therapist, and diligently developed a new routine of physical therapy exercises to alleviate what I now understand to be compressed nerves. It was a slow injury of repetitive misuse of sitting in the car, and it will be an extremely slow recovery of twice daily exercises, improved posture, avoidance of those bad behaviors, massage, meditation and patience. As my mobility decreased from the injury, my panic increased. I played out the worst case scenario with no assist from the internet, and found myself battling as profusely with my mind as with my ever increasingly painful body. Chronic pain is confusing, as it has you running into the same unexpected wall again and again, wondering how you got there and unsure how to get around it. It’s maddening. My other Annie checked in regularly.

How’s the pain?

My response was not even with an attempt at positivity. I was getting worse. After two weeks, I finally fell apart.

I feel completely hopeless, I wrote back.

Oh man, I am so sorry! I hate that hopelessness. She is a mean ass house guest, Annie replied, referencing our favorite shared Rumi poem.

Hopelessness was just passing through, then, I remembered. This is temporary, but she is telling me that this is forever. This is who I am now. My career is done. She wanted me to feel bad for myself, and for everyone else to feel bad for me, too. So, I took a day to do just that. I let hopelessness have the living room, the bedroom, the whole damn house. I moped. I acted indifferently to the things I love. I despaired. And letting her reign was just what I needed, because the next morning I woke up thinking of Anne Muree’s grandmother, and Hopelessness was gone.

Anne Muree’s grandmother was a successful singer in Chicago when she up and got married and moved to the expanse of North Dakota. It was the early 1900s, when women didn’t fare well on the prairie. If it wasn’t the cold or the heat or the childbearing with lack of immediate medical resources, it was the insanity of isolation. The men went out to work all day in the fields– oil or beets– with the women at home with miles and hours between them and a decent grown-up conversation, packed in with snow or heat and the incessant needs of a whole brood of children chronically unmet.

Anne Muree’s grandmother did not despair. Or maybe she did. But she did not fight the despair of the wide unruly prairie– she welcomed it in. As the womenfolk suffocated from this environment around her, she went out to meet it. She was not to become a casualty of the landscape, but rather became part of it.

Shortly after her fifth child was born, Anne’s grandmother got a job as a postal worker. Behind her at home, she hired two local girls to stay and care for the children. Two so that they had one another’s company, I presume, providing both a couple of jobs and not perpetuating the cycle of women in isolation, paying for the needs of others with their bodies and their mental health. She used up nearly her whole paycheck to cover the expense, but it was worth it as she took to the long lonesome skies delivering mail across the state.

And she sang all along the way.

Out there, she satiated her itch for travel and nurtured her and her kinswoman need for company, chatting at each stop before making her way on the long miles between. And on those long miles, she used what she had– her voice. Lore has it that on the coldest days, when the air is so thin and shroudless, you could hear her singing coming over on the wind from ten miles away. Ten miles.

She died of old age, somewhere in her nineties.

It’s a helluva way to beat the odds. She could’ve run back to Chicago. With a ten mile voice, she could’ve made it in Chicago for sure. She could’ve written herself off as a Tree Person and settled her discontent somewhere that felt safer. But she didn’t. She opened her door to the brittle wind and met it. And for this, she became a prairie legend. The singing postman before John Prine knew his name, with a trail of hearts saved, stamped, sent and delivered into a small oasis of warm kindness in freezing tundra.

I am still in the midst of my recovery. Today, it does not feel like I will be better. I am tempted to imagine myself before the injury, or to project myself forward to when the pain is no longer there, when I can move and feel like myself again. But myself does not exist any more without the pain than I exist with it. I can fight the landscape I am in, defending my lack of presence by claiming that I am a pain-free Tree person, one who needs to be without pain and beneath my favorite maples to be fully productive. I could pack up and go home. Or I can look at this small, fierce land and I can accept it. And once I accept it, perhaps I will open the door, I will tie up my boots, and I will sing into it. There is no doubt I will feel the bitterness, but let it come. Maybe, with a little more openness, I will be able to look into the endless sky of it and know I am limitless, that bitterness makes sweetness better, that if I use what I have, on the most bleak of days, you can hear me singing ten miles away.