The Smoke Chose Here.
WE-001
In April 2026, Cash and I went to South Dakota looking for a place to live.
That sounds more decisive than it was.
We had been looking at places for a while.
Different states. Different towns. Different possibilities.
The sort of search that begins practically enough.
Cost of living.
Housing.
Jobs.
Weather.
Can we afford it?
Could we actually live there?
Then eventually you’ve looked at enough maps and houses and statistics that every place starts becoming a collection of numbers on a screen.
South Dakota was supposed to be another candidate.
Another place to investigate.
Another possibility to bring home and pick apart.
That was the plan, anyway.
I was the one who wanted to see it.
Something about South Dakota had gotten into my head before I’d ever been there.
I couldn’t explain it particularly well.
Believe me, that is inconvenient when you’re trying to convince your husband that the two of you should travel hundreds of miles to investigate a place based partly on the compelling argument of:
“I don’t know. I just have a feeling.”
Very responsible.
Extremely scientific.
Cash came with me anyway.
So we drove west.
And somewhere along the way, the research trip stopped feeling like research.
I don’t know exactly where.
That’s the part that bothers me.
You’d think I’d remember.
There should have been a sign.
Not an actual South Dakota highway sign.
Something bigger.
A moment when I looked at Cash and said:
This is it.
But I don’t remember one.
I remember pieces.
The road.
The sky.
Land opening farther than my Wisconsin eyes were accustomed to.
Badlands rising out of nowhere looking almost unreasonable.
Little towns.
Roadside stops.
Prairie dogs who temporarily hijacked our itinerary because apparently I can be bought with tiny hands and peanuts.
Long stretches in the car with Cash.
Looking.
Talking.
Imagining.
And this strange feeling that kept getting stronger instead of wearing off.
We’d done this before.
That’s important.
South Dakota wasn’t the first place we’d considered.
There had been other possibilities.
Other places that looked good on paper.
Places where I could make a perfectly respectable argument for why we might build a life there.
But I was always evaluating them.
I could see myself standing outside the place somehow, holding a clipboard.
Good.
Bad.
Possible.
Not possible.
Maybe.
South Dakota did something different.
I stopped evaluating.
I started picturing where we’d put our stuff.
That’s such a small distinction.
It changed everything.
There is a difference between asking,
Could I live here?
and catching yourself thinking,
What would our life look like here?
I hadn’t consciously crossed that line.
My brain apparently wandered over without filing the appropriate paperwork.
Suddenly I wasn’t just looking at houses.
I was imagining mornings.
Grocery stores.
Normal Tuesdays.
Where we’d drive.
Where Cash might work.
What it would feel like to have family visit.
Where we’d take Gryffin.
Not vacation South Dakota.
Not postcard South Dakota.
Tuesday afternoon, we’re out of milk South Dakota.
That was the version I wanted to know.
And strangely, the more ordinary I imagined it becoming, the more I wanted it.
I watched Cash, too.
That mattered.
Because this couldn’t only be my place.
I may be the woman capable of developing a full emotional attachment to a state before obtaining sufficient supporting documentation, but there are two people in this marriage.
Three if you count the Sheriff, and he remains largely useless in relocation negotiations.
Cash needed to feel something here too.
I didn’t want to talk him into loving it.
That’s not the same thing.
So I watched.
I listened.
I probably asked some version of “What do you think?” far too many times while pretending I was being casual.
And somewhere during that trip, I realized I wasn’t the only one doing it.
He could see us there too.
That may have been the moment.
Or maybe there wasn’t one.
Maybe places don’t always arrive in your life with trumpets.
Maybe sometimes you drive through them long enough that your shoulders drop before your brain understands why.
South Dakota wasn’t perfect.
I need that written down.
Because memory likes to polish things.
There were things we’d have to figure out.
Money.
Work.
Housing.
Moving.
The enormous logistical circus involved in relocating an entire life from one state to another.
We weren’t standing under some magical South Dakota sky while all our problems evaporated into pink smoke.
We were still us.
Our problems had made the trip.
They were probably somewhere in the backseat eating snacks.
But for the first time during all that searching, the questions weren’t making me want to look somewhere else.
I wanted to solve them there.
That’s how I knew something had changed.
By the time we came home, the search was over.
We hadn’t moved.
We hadn’t bought anything.
Nothing had been signed.
Our Wisconsin life was still waiting exactly where we’d left it.
But the giant question we’d been carrying around with us had an answer now.
South Dakota.
I didn’t know yet that a few weeks later I’d secure wildjai.com.
I didn’t know that by July I’d be teaching myself to build a website.
I didn’t know there would be an LLC.
A business account.
Dream Cream.
Pink Smoke.
A Rebel Cowgirl.
A whole strange universe that didn’t exist yet.
None of that had names.
But something had been disturbed out there.
Something I couldn’t put back where it had been.
That’s why I keep returning to April.
Not because that trip created Wild Jai.
I don’t think that’s quite right.
She wasn’t invented in South Dakota.
There were pieces of her scattered through my whole life.
Stubborn pieces.
Restless pieces.
Things I’d loved.
Things I’d survived.
Things I’d wanted and hadn’t known what to call.
South Dakota didn’t manufacture any of them.
It was just the first place where they seemed to recognize each other.
And I came home different enough to notice.
I’ve wondered what it was about that place.
The Badlands?
The openness?
The quiet?
The people?
The strange relief of looking out across all that land and feeling something inside me unclench?
I still don’t have a clean answer.
Maybe I never will.
That’s fine.
Some things become less interesting once you’ve explained them to death.
What I know is this:
We went to South Dakota looking for a place to live.
We came home knowing where.
And somewhere between those two facts, something else happened that I am still tracing.
There wasn’t any pink smoke in the sky that day.
Not really.
That came later.
But when I look backward now, I can see exactly where the first little curl of it rose.
South Dakota had already answered.
I was just a few months behind.
♥ Wild Jai