Home on the Plains

This same exact sign used to hang above I80 as I crossed the invisible line between Council Bluffs and Omaha. Somehow in all the construction going on it got taken down, which makes my drive from Iowa City to Lincoln seem somewhat less monumental. It had been an official 'welcome home' in the midst of interstate cement and scary drivers. 

A recent conversation about home towns and small town claims to fame (ie: Welcome to Pocahontas, Iowa : a real place, I swear.

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and finishing Willa Cather's My Antonia (a novel about Nebraska in the days of sod houses and wagons), I feel like 'Home on the Plains' is a perfect topic for this week's blog. When I was in London, I took a module called "Creative Writing and Place," which ended up being the most broad-ended, open-genre class I've ever taken. My classmates were everything from travel writers to poets and as long as our work somehow related to 'place' (in whatever way we interpreted that) we could write whatever we pleased. I wrote surprisingly a lot about Nebraska and Iowa. It wasn't that I was homesick per se, it was just whenever I sat down to write about a place, interstates and sunsets over cornfields weighed heavier on my mind than Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower. Maybe it was because people already consider Europe gorgeous and I wanted to prove the Midwest is too. Maybe that's why Willa Cather wrote My Antonia. But that's beside the point.

Anyway, one day in class we were reading a travel essay out loud about...IOWA. My English classmates seriously examined the way in which Bill Bryson had portrayed this country so different from their own, while I nearly went into hysterics laughing to myself in the corner. The essay was an account of the Des Moines-born Bryson who was back in America after twenty years in the United Kingdom. He was retracing the route his father drove to get to his grandparents' house in Winfield, Iowa, and making comments such as: "Apart from the ceaseless fidgeting of the corn, there is not a sound. Somebody could sneeze in a house three miles away and you would hear it (Bless you! Thank you!),” or “Small towns are equally unhelpful in offering distinguishing features. About all the separates them are their names. They always have a gas station, a grocery store, a grain elevator, a place selling farm equipment and fertilizers, and something improbable like a microwave-oven dealer or a dry-cleaner’s, so you can say to yourself as you glide through the town: ‘Now what would they be doing with a dry-cleaner’s in Fungus City?’” (Bill Bryson, ‘More Fat Girls in Des Moines).

I think my English classmates and tutor (English-term for professor) felt it would be rude to laugh, and I wonder how I would have reacted if they had. I feel perfectly at ease cracking jokes about my home (and I consider both Nebraska and Iowa home – even though I will be cheering for the Huskers next Thanksgiving [dear God, please don’t let the Hawkeyes kill me]), but I find myself so offended when people who aren’t aren't actually from these states make the same jokes. My response was to write the following for class:

THE GOOD LIFE

By Sarah M. Kosch

I know it’s not fair for me to make jokes at the expense of my home and then get offended when others do the same. But I do. I know Nebraska as a friend, a companion for twenty-one years. We’ve had our quarrels; I’ve stormed out on multiple occasions, but I always come back eventually. I never stop loving the place in all its infuriating smallness.

 But those people who know Nebraska by name only, or in passing—even if I smile and accept your jibes about the flatness, the dull expanse, the belief in a backwards country with horse-drawn buggies and no electricity— there is a sadness around my lungs. I can still breathe, but I wish you would breathe with me, and we could merge into one, just for a moment, so I could paint you a memory and together we could remember that Nebraska is beautiful.

               

I think I would paint you this one.

A long yellow line, sloping across the page.

I know it’s not much. No mountains, no forests, no desert. It is not extreme here. Just gentle. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Right now, we’re driving on the interstate. It’s an easy drive, although I admit, it does get a bit long. But sometimes, when clouds brush on blue in just the right way, or the pinks of a sunset melt like strawberry ice cream, they crown these open fields with gold. The wheat is alive, expanding - inhaling and exhaling. The fields stretch. Cornstalks dance. It is life in the simple. In the yellow. Keep inside the fading lines and drive onwards into a new canvas.

A light blue watercolor. Translucent shimmer.

Sunrise in a gauzy gown. So light she barely feels it. So light it barely hides the curves and pale skin of her body. She is walking down a gravel road in the country. I don’t know the name. There is farmland on each side of her. The stalks and leaves are sequined with dew drops, and the damp cool whispers on her bare arms. Soon the smell of dust and the touch of heat will waltz through the dirt rows and leap onto the road to join her. She will hold their hands, and together they will sprint over the hill and disappear.

Now, the crisscross weave of a screen door painted with thin silver.

I think it has always creaked. I think it has always smelled like remembering  what was: a kitchen  the color of toast and orange juice, a bedroom of pillow fights and little girls missing teeth, a living room with the best armchair for naps, a basement where bank robbers and restaurant owners danced to polkas and sold purses for plastic money. I think Grandma can’t be lonely surrounded by all the fond memories, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they are better seen from a distance. On Grandpa's last Fourth of July he sat on the back patio while the rest of us, the children and grandchildren, stood past the trees where we could see the sky. I went inside to get a drink of water, and when I came out I asked Grandpa why he didn't sit closer. He told me he could see fine from where he was.

A gentle breath; let it dry.

For every stereotype, there is a grain of truth. This is what is true about Nebraskans. We like to sit around campfires out in the middle of nowhere. We love to drink beer, but it is an acquired taste. We start out with cheap vodka and rum. We listen to twangy guitar music about love and loss, but we also listen to bumpy beats and rhythms that make our hips want to swing on their own accord. We love and lose. We cry sometimes. We drive our cars with the windows down. We like to look at the sky at night and be able to see the Big Dipper and Orion’s belt. We wish we knew the names of the rest. Some of us find out. Some don’t.  But there is a thread stitched onto our backs that tugs us when we walk too far. We cannot see it, but I think it is yellow. Or blue so light it is invisible.

Tune in next week for some Travel Writing about I-O-W-A!