The holiday hubbub is over. The lights, tinsel and shiny ornaments that looked so right less than a week ago now look tired, artificially cheerful, superfluous. It's time to put them away and get back to normal, to figure out how to fill the empty space that yawns in front of us until leaves and flowers and bike rides and baseball arrive to fill it up.

It's time to reacquaint ourselves with seeing things plainly: hard edges, bare branches, unadorned silhouettes. It's time to make peace with the absence of color, to remember how to like gray, and brown, and a fleeting white that gets dingy too soon.

 In the harsh light of early January we see ourselves more clearly, too. We face the physical and financial effects of holiday overindulgences. We dig out dilemmas put away while making merry. After a period of intense activity, we re-learn how to be happy with fewer distractions, how to be quiet.

2005 is a clean canvas, at once blissfully pure and terrifyingly empty.

All this is magnified when you live in New York. It's a common ailment of modern life to constantly seek diversion, but it's most intense in the city. After a more manic holiday high, you crash harder. There's more grit and grime. Any bits of nature, confined to parks and medians in the best of weather, now are dormant and utterly dwarfed by things manmade. The streets, though teeming with activity, look bleak.

At home in Nebraska, the Christmas comedown is smoother. There's a connectedness with the land that makes a less-than-colorful landscape more interesting. Nature never gets tired or dirty; it just changes, a fact that helps me to appreciate winter as a necessary precursor to spring, as well as to enjoy it on its own terms.

And in Nebraska you can see more of the sky, which, like the ocean, is equally, consistently beautiful in every season.

It's hard to see much of the sky in New York. Unless you live or work up high, you never see sunsets, sunrises or artful cloud formations. And down among tall buildings, you rarely, if ever, get a glimpse of the horizon.

When I first moved away from Lincoln, my mom commented that while visiting me she missed being able to turn 360 degrees and see the horizon at every point.

That's a remarkable feeling in our built-up world, and one reserved for us flatlanders. One quick spin and you're socked with a sense of perspective. You may not quite be able to see the curve of the earth, but you can see out, out and away, and if you can sort of float up above yourself and take a mental snapshot looking back down, you see yourself as a little upright iron filing suspended in place by the magnetic pull of the sun. It's a moment for imagining the size and shape of the universe and feeling your place in it. Faced with all that vast sky, you are literally "grounded."

No one captures the feeling of looking at the horizon or the peace of a Nebraska winter landscape like painter Keith Jacobshagen. His paintings are almost all sky, with a thin stripe of land at the bottom and us and our lives in there somewhere, invisible yet not insignificant. Looking at his work, my mind goes calm.

   In his biography on the Web site of his Lincoln dealer, Kiechel Fine Art, he describes himself as "a Midwesterner who has stayed put to make sense of where I live." I think that's a noble aim, and all too rare in a time where so many people go far to see everything and wind up making sense of nothing.

Though he paints only within a 60-mile radius of Lincoln, his works travel and translate well —you can see them in museums and galleries all over the country. I've even seen one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the summer of 1995 on a weekend jaunt from my summer nannying gig in the Hamptons.

In Lincoln, he's everywhere: at Sheldon, on the walls of my parents' living room, even, coincidentally, at a Christmas party I attended, in a corner where I was hiding out, eating shrimp cocktail.

 And, of course, Lincolnites have easy access to his subject. I tried to stockpile some sky while I was at home. I saw as many sunsets from my brother's 10th floor windows as possible, and did a couple of daytime drives back and forth to Omaha, where I saw exactly what Jacobshagen sees when he paints, sky that dwarfs the land.

I couldn't take that sky back to New York with me, but I do know where to find it here. Though none of Jacobshagen's works is on public display in New York at the moment, I'm lucky enough to have a private reserve. I own a small oil, painted on the day I was born. At the bottom, in pencil, it says "for Kelly Elizabeth, August 24, 1976."

At the time, he lived in the same building as my mom and dad. The story goes that when they left to go to the hospital, they asked him if he would look in on their two cats, Captain and Chester. Thus alerted to my impending birth, he painted something to mark the occasion.

Needless to say, the painting is among my most prized possessions. I have it hanging on my bedroom wall and I always show it off, especially to people who have never been to Nebraska before, because it's beautiful, and because it captures the state — its appearance and its essence. It's the most eloquent way I can think of to show people where I came from, to tell them about this place without saying a word.

And in this New Year, when I'm thinking of how to fill up my canvas, one glance at my wall will put things in perspective.

Kelly Bare is a writer and editor in New York. She can be reached at kellybare76@yahoo.com.