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We were driving by the on the way to a cemetery. It’s where my wife’s folks are buried. A couple of times a year, we drive there and put new flowers on the gravestone. We often take pictures of the kids and their cousins together.

The first time we did that, I found it odd, almost morbid. But over the years, as the kids have gotten older and the photos mark the passage of time, it’s grown on me. Nana loved her grandkids, and there’s something special about them finding a way to spend time with her over the Christmas holiday.

She died in the summer of 2019. The year before, I got to spend a special week with her, driving her to the hospital in Springfield for radiation treatments.

That’s when I first visited the Caney Mountain Conservation Area. I went there to take a hike during my sojourn in Ozark County in the fall of 2018. The park is full of rolling and rocky hills, pristine streams and Leopold Cabin. I came across the cabin during my hike and ended up writing a column about how in the 1940s, Starker Leopold came to Caney Mountain to nurse Missouri’s dwindling wild turkey population back to life.

Back at my brother-in-law’s house after the cemetery visit, I shared my bit of unusual Ozark County knowledge — how the park once run by a Morrison is at the center of the conservation movement in Missouri, including the preservation of wild turkey hunting.

Unlike virtually everybody in my wife’s family, I’m not a hunter. It’s why there are times during family celebrations, like the Christmas one we had last weekend, where I feel like the odd man out. I’ve never hunted or farmed. I don’t own a gun or drive a tractor. My existence in the city — er, suburbs — is quite a bit different than theirs in rural Missouri.

But we have our connections. Like Caney Mountain. Like the cemetery. Like the Lincoln School. That’s the old one-room schoolhouse for Black students in West Plains, Missouri that I wrote about earlier this year. A man named Crocket Oaks III, who used to live in St. Louis, is refurbishing the school as a cultural community center. Oaks’ father was one of the last people to attend the Lincoln School before desegregation in the 1950s. Years later, he would work in a factory in West Plains with my wife’s uncle Clay.

At the Christmas celebration this year, I told Clay that story. He remembered Mr. Oaks, at least a little bit. We chatted for a while as he reminisced about days gone by.

In Missouri, we spend a lot of time talking about our differences. The rural-urban divide. Blue islands in a state that is now a sea of red. But our connections are there, even if they’re harder to find. I think that’s one reason I’ve spent a lot of time reporting from rural counties in recent years, from Iron to Warren, St. Francois to Dent, Howell to Washington.

Every time I visit one of those places, two things happen. First, I’m reconnected to what a beautiful state Missouri is, with its hills, river country and small towns with historic courthouses. Most of the folks in those towns want the same things folks in the city want: a roof over their heads, a fair way to make a living and support their families, good schools, something to pass down to the next generation.

How do we get there?

We have some agreement: good wages, taking care of our most vulnerable citizens, keeping corruption out of government.

It’s a great irony of the current state of Missouri politics — many issues that divide our elected officials actually unite state voters when questions appear via ballot initiative.

There are reasons for that related to our broken political system. But it’s Christmas, let’s leave the politics for another day. Instead, let’s return to Caney Mountain. Missouri has wild turkey hunting today because a professor from the University of California-Berkely camped out there in the 1940s and nurtured a dying population.

That’s an odd connection worth celebrating in a state of vast beauty, which bridges the tiniest towns with large urban landscapes.