Basking in the Glow

Jennifer Wendt’s first loves were farm in northeast Kansas, she was her father’s little helper. Together they’d ride tractors and combines as they tended to crops, and she’d follow him around as he checked and fed their cows. She spent her weekends with her siblings “baking” mud pies full of sticks, acorns, and fallen fruit, and riding around on her make-believe horse, also known as her bike.

“I’d spend hours out in the woods tracking deer and bobcat and turkeys and anything that I could track or find, just exploring and spending time with my farm animals, our cattle,” she says. Along with her love of animals, Wendt says she was born with a passion for art and credits her mother, who kept boxes of her artwork from over the years, with encouraging her to draw everything around her.

Read the full article in the January/February 2026 issue.