by Carrie Moritz, Gazette

            To take a whimsical journey, all one must do at times is stop and notice what's around- the smell in the air, the wind in the grass, or the color of the sky. Lonnette Kelley, author of "Joy in the Heartland," opted to take a whimsical journey in early 2020, just as the pandemic was taking hold in the U.S. The subsequent book, which is for sale at the Visitors Center in the old bathhouse at Split Rock Park, takes a whimsical journey through southeast South Dakota, including Garretson and Sherman, bouncing from community to community and finding the unusual or notable.

            Kelley, like many others her age, were finding that COVID-19 was striking the most vulnerable and placing so many into an impossible decision- to isolate in order to stay healthy, or to suffer the loneliness that came with isolation, which also struck the vulnerable down.

            Her 55-year career as a nurse suddenly brought to a halt, she found the change to be difficult.

            "I'd always been on the front lines," she said. "Watching, and knowing my friends in the nursing home and how they were struggling, it was a very difficult time."

            She began to alleviate that loneliness by reaching out to others, creating small "thinking of you" cards on her computer and sending them via mail.

            The cards became a journey of their own. Adorned with a drawing of a small animal and a verse from scripture, she sent one card every other day for fourteen days to each recipient, covering COVID isolation protocols at the time. They began with a hug, and ended with victory, to let the recipient know they had made it through the extreme isolation period. At the end of the first year, she had sent 4,000 cards.

            "My story started with these," she said as she showed the cards. "I was really struggling, I had a lot of loss prior to COVID. I had lost my mother, I had lost my husband, I had lost my son... and I was hearing of all this other stuff going on and it was hard."

            Despite this purpose, Kelley said she needed to be refreshed. On another whim, she and a friend climbed into his truck one day, and started taking random trips in different directions. Over the course of six months, these trips eventually coalesced into ten different trails throughout Southeast South Dakota.

            The trips not only gave the two 70-year-olds something to do, but a photo contest that Kelley heard of gave her a purpose. She was on the hunt for the perfect photograph to shoot.

            In the end, she took 1600 photos on her little point-and-shoot camera in 51 South Dakota towns, covering a 50-mile radius around Sioux Falls.

            When asked if the book was the goal, Kelley said no.

            "The whole thing was not planned," Kelley said. "It just kind of came step-by-step, and it wasn't until I finished my trip that I said, 'You know, I think there's a story here.' I felt so compelled to do it. It just started unraveling and coming to fruition."

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