And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot Four Quartets

I grew up on a sheep farm outside of Fargo, and that city, on the edge of the North Dakota prairie, is my home. I say this even though I’ve lived in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Colorado, and Scotland. I’ve spent more than half of my life away from Fargo, and yet it’s still my home.

Which is not to say that I know the Fargo area very well. Not anymore.

Last weekend, I drove north to help my parents with flood preparations. Just two years after a record-breaking flood, the Red River that runs through Fargo is set to flood again. My parents’ home is perched behind a permanent dike on the river, which carries its freezing water north into Canada.

After clearing away ice and snow so that workers could add another 2,000 sandbags to my parents’ dike, we took a drive through the city. Many of the old neighborhoods along the river are gone, replaced by flood walls, dikes, and pumping stations. Seeing the city for the first time, my husband was struck by the acres of clay dikes, built to hold back the river. They were new to me as well.

We also went to Atomic Coffee, where I once spent several months of impoverished unemployment drinking coffee and writing my doctoral dissertation. (Despite having a laptop, I wrote by hand in those days, on yellow legal pads.) The painted bison outside the window was new, but the coffee tasted as good as I remembered.

Better than I remembered: the Stave Church nearby, an exact replica of one of the 29 remaining medieval churches in Norway. We loved its dragon carvings, its strange integration of pagan and Christian, Gothic and Viking.

The Stave Church also stands beside the river, waiting for the coming flood.