Where the Corn is as High as an Elephant's Eye...

Sunday, August 12, 2007
KOA kampground, Mitchell, South Dakota

Coming home, there is a slow sensual familiarity that creeps over me, starting when we cross the Missouri and leave the arid Badlands far behind. I can identify the crops in the fields, copses of deciduous trees again soften the rolling landscape, the sky grows slightly less squintingly blue, and as I awake in the morning my hair has curled in its old way and the air has a substance, a presence on my skin, that carries the smell of earth and growing things, that I never feel in my adopted West. After a few more hours of driving we will be back at the farm.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Draper farm, Grundy County, Iowa

The air here can be eaten with a spoon, and our nighttime dreams have often been accompanied by strobe-like lightning and low peals of thunder. The ground is saturated with rain, the ditches like swamps. But still the farm works its spell on me: 12 miles from town, with nothing to see but acre after expansive acre of corn and beans and the comfortably spaced windbreaks and farmhouses, I settle into an eat-work-read-sleep routine, lightened by my mother’s willingness to wash dishes and cook and my dad’s tidiness that is as reliable and reassuring as sunrise. I am not yet required to be parent to my parents, and I am grateful to slip back into being their child.

The robins are all finished raising their families, and their abandoned nests are dropping out of the trees now in the downpours. But there is a mourning dove sitting on her newly hatched babies in one of the spruces in the new windbreak; she was still there after the tremendous storm Sunday night, watchful as ever.

All is not complete rest at the moment, since Walt succumbed last night to agonizing muscle spasms in his back. He spent all day Saturday trimming the gigantic honeysuckle hedge with the chainsaw, forgot to continue his regimen of ibuprofen yesterday, then spent several hours yesterday evening scrunched up in his theater seat watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. So today he was confined to bed, a complete invalid. One day of this and I know I was not meant to be a nurse. Reed, however, might be; he ran up and down the stairs with water and food, sang songs, tried to read a Frog and Toad story for Papa, etc. We made it all the way down the stairs so Walt could take a shower this evening, and made it back up again, so I have high hopes for tomorrow.

We arrived just over a week ago on a Sunday evening. Monday I spent doing laundry and trying to organize all our gear, and on Tuesday we got up early and drove down to the Iowa State Fair, with a little caravan of Drapers; Glen and Vicki leading in their truck, then us, and then Dad and Lois behind. Alice had gone earlier in the morning. Mom had to stay home since her abscessed tooth swelled up to grotesque proportions and was giving her a lot of pain. We all sat around fanning ourselves and sweating among the hordes of people while the Century Farm awards were given, clapping occasionally, until finally, when it was the Draper farm in Grundy County’s turn, no one was left in the building, since ours was the last county before the lunch break. We got up on stage, shook the Ag secretary’s hand, smiled for the camera and the completely deserted rows of benches, and then with relief headed off to find some cold ice cream and an air conditioned building.

Reed’s first trip to the Iowa State Fair ought to be a memorable one, as I let him ride on the big slide by himself, showed him the life-size butter cow and the butter Harry Potter, let him meander through the cattle barn and the sheep barn, took him on Ye Olde Mill, let him get all wet in the fountain, and finished up with a ride on the Sky Glider. Someday maybe he’ll take his wife or girlfriend on Ye Olde Mill and remember his first ride with mom… or maybe not! The food was notable in that I allowed him to eat junk food basically the entire day (we didn’t have much choice, surrounded as we were by corn dogs, elephant ears, deep-fried Twinkies, and beer on a stick), starting with French fries and a cinnamon roll for a mid-morning snack, continuing with a vanilla shake for lunch from the dairy barn, and finishing up with a BLT wrap from the relatively healthy “Salad Bowl” stand. We drank so much water on this blistering day I had to replenish our empty bottles at one point at a water spigot inside the sheep barn, where the 4-H kids fill the animals’ water pails. Water is water, I figured, and I knew they wouldn’t have anything but the best for state fair livestock.

Eating on the farm in Iowa is alternately blissful and frustrating for me; one day we’ll have chicken and noodles - comfort food straight from my childhood - accompanied by sweet cherry tomatoes still warm from the sun, finishing up with chocolate zucchini cake… and then at breakfast I’m faced with storebought whole wheat bread for toasting, thin, soft, characterless, and seemingly designed for preschoolers to eat with processed American cheese, which is about the most exciting cheese I can find at Family Foods in Grundy Center. I used to work there, by the way, when Walt and I lived in Grundy 10 years ago. I worked in the deli/bakery, frying donuts at 3 in the morning, cleaning out the chicken fryer at 8 at night, washing dishes, baking cookies, cakes, and breads, pressure frying chicken, assembling potato salad and chocolate dream pie, and filling up the hot food case with barbecued ribs, rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes, meatloaf, cheesy cauliflower, and green bean casserole. All the stuff we Iowans love so much. But the experience put me off grocery store deli food forever, just as baking at the Mojo in Sitka permanently quelched my appetite for muffins. Anyway, I never meant to become a bread snob, but after having fresh loaves from the co-op or Sage Bakery every day back home, I’ve reached the point of no return for bread. I have yet to discover what I’ll miss from here once I’ve gotten to France… but bread won’t be one of them.