The Horn of Plenty Busy Already

In one of my favorite hokey little towns in Iowa is a farm stand with a huge ten foot tall cornucopia out front. I don’t know that it’s always on display but the sheer size and slightly faded nature of it leads me to believe it’s a permanent installation. Besides, if I built a show-stopper like that I would leave it up forever and perhaps add night time spotlighting to extend my neighbors hours of viewing pleasrue. I drive by this wonder and I see my happy self in a garden. Engineer striped overalls and a worn straw hat (although I have waged a ceaseless quest to find any hat that doesn’t bind my head and make me look like a perverted trucker or gullible rube at a rodeo (but you have to remember this is an imaginary garden). Song birds riding on my shoulders like St Francis of Assisi, veggies rapidly greening and pumpkins inflating before my very eyes, master gardener of all I survey. Even in this rich fantasy a small bitter segment in the back of my minds asks…”What then.”

The “Then” is acres of rotting goods, frozen tomatoes turning transparent before dropping into puddles of ooze, pumpkins collapsing inwardly on themselves to hide their shame of harvestlessness and flat wilted greens so slick you could skate on them. It’s a sad image, I love fresh veggies. When the nectar and ambrosia blight hits, the gods will eat crisp salads as the only palatable alternative. I also know you are thinking ahead, silently pleading with me to save the carnage, harvest and preserve Mother Earth’s sweet gifts. Your cries will fall on deaf ears though. I won’t can. I’ll not even consider it for a minute. You can’t make me can!

The act of canning really sounds like the kind of thing I would enjoy. Clear shiny glass jars, a fresh coat of red or orange or green on a starched white apron. Amazing fruit smells drifting forth from the kitchen satiating the house in a cloud of welcoming lucious steam. Sweet and sticky jam coated pots to lick, crisp things to chop. Should be heaven, right? I think it all gets back to my childhood really (what’s that Dr. Freud lie back down on the couch?). Our entire back yard was a garden. Stinky compost, a natural (thumb and forefinger squish) pesticide program and a far-ahead-of-their-time approach to eliminating sugar from the family diet. Imagine a world of never sweet enough jelly, alum free gummy pickles rolled into a simple vegetarian diet. Like the cucumbers I was forced to tend, I am strong but I have a bitter core. I was often offered a glimpse of how things should be. Rare trips to Grandma’s (now that I have children of my own to complain to me about my shortcomings I realize we were probably there very often) crunchy pickles and sweet spoonfuls of jelly to be eaten by the bowl full. A basement full of cupboards and shelves bowing beneath the combined tonnage from years of preserved harvest from the most amazing little garden. Even that fine dose of Americana is tainted by my Grandfather, years after Grandma’s death fighting a race against the clock to consume blackening jellies, soft-spotted pickles and unidentifiable jarred masses, their ghosted labels unreadable. That we never found him dead under a pile of broken jars at the kitchen table surprises me even to this day. So I will happily pass by the golden field of America’s bread basket, past the pick-your-own stands and farmers markets, occasionally stopping in for fresh salad ingredients for that night’s supper. I will even continue my quaint daydreams of rolling fields and green thumbs before reality calls me back, standing a bare plot or dirt, unplanted crops, unloved soil, the only wildlife a few sharp crows pulling at my hair to get the last few strands of straw hat. Dazed and hungry, nothing but a bird beaten leather hatband welded to my head like a too tight sweatband, too faded to fight on. I hear that Green Giant guy wants a piece of me too.


~ Jeff

Whoa! Let's Not Get Ahead of Ourselves

I am constantly challenged by scope and scale. Not really much of a “toe in the water” kind of guy I guess. We are thinking of relocating to a small town and looking for the simple farmhouse of our forefathers. We have a goal of living mortgage free and owing nobody nuthin’. But as Craig’s list and farms.com and realtor.com quietly push dreams across my computer screen several times a day, my sweet little farmhouse with room for chickens and a barn (because barns are cool) and pies cooling in the window grows ever larger with each email, electronically morphing into countless rolling hills of my own acreage, and the kitchen now looks out across the horse-filled stable with my hired man “Red” bringing in fresh picked sweet corn as he heads across to milk the cows for tomorrows coffee (free beans sent daily fresh from Hawaii just because my reputation precedes itself). Of course there is now also a bunk house for Red and his men to sleep (but not a cider house – I don’t want that kind of people around). I have had to build another outbuilding to house the front-end loader (purchased to clear the area for my private airstrip. Iowa’s only flat until your roll across its bumpy hills on two tiny wheels at 120 m.p.h.). I purchased the Cessna to get over my dislike of small planes and only weenies rent ‘em. I’ve also had to buy the place next to us and raze the houses it was blocking a bit of the afternoon sun and keeping the orchids in the greenhouse from blooming year round. I can have all of this for a fraction of what it would cost here in Colorado. My mortgage going up a few hundred thousand. The peace and quiet of the good life in my far away farmhouse. Pure and simple…If I could only see it through the reflected glare of the Olympic size pool. Of course I’m looking forward to swimming in it…Just as soon as I get back from my second job and before I start my night job. When did I get so tired?

~Jeff

Iowa is “Awesome”

This isn’t really a blog about how awesome Iowa is (although how awesome Iowa is has been on my mind lately). We just got back from “Fall Break”, a week off of school that didn’t exist when I was a kid. I guess it’s part of the movement to make everything equal so nobody is disappointed or universally disappointed, I guess it depends on your motivation. I believe it is one of the vestiges of George Bush’s “no season left behind” legacy. I think next year my kids will have to go back to school for one week in July so summer doesn’t feel left out. Embracing the idea of an extra week of family time we decided on a family trip. We let them know it was their vacation so it was their choice. After shooting down Mexico (too expensive), Canada (too cold) and India (too India), we utilized a little passive directive parenting and our children chose Iowa for an autumn adventure (I think we gave them a choice of Iowa, the stockyards or a labor camp). It was our typical Iowa trip…7 days of driving to 53 towns and looking at 73 houses –C’mon, what’s not for a kid to love? After a million miles on the road and as much pastoral beauty as the law will allow, we returned late on a Sunday night and as we ushered our children into the cold dark house I asked my groggy son how he liked Iowa. “Iowa is awesome.” A single sentence whispered in a slumbered delirium sent my heart soaring. He was onboard. He would embrace the move. He would help me plow the forty acres. He would ride the mule. The farm house, the simple life, small town parades and golden crusted apple pies dance through my excited mind. I tucked him into bed, the moonlight casting a bright halo over my sleeping angel’s golden hair. My moment of bliss fast fading in anticipation of the mornings post road-trip tasks of laundering week old dank clothes and shop vacuuming cheetos from the Chevy Suburban’s numerous crevices, I drifted peacefully off to sleep.

I awoke the next morning back in the everyday. I had things to do and people to move. I asked Atticus if he wanted me to pack a lunch or if he wanted hot lunch. “Dad, your lunches are awesome.” I do pack a mean lunch – a state-of-the-art assemblage of a ham sandwich, juice bag, chips and fruit (I haven’t yet trademarked this combo yet but if you try it everyone will know it’s mine and there will be justice served in the stern looks you will receive from other Mom’s at the bus stop). He said Awesome! He loves my lunches! What a great Dad I am! I asked him if he was ready for the everyday grind to return. “School is awesome.” And he loves school too! What a great life we’ve made for our children. Such a great feeling it lasts all day, heck I barely even want to beat my children for all of the disgusting crap that found its way to the floor mats during the road trip – Is that a banana peel around a moldy hot dog? The car wash’s Monster Vac (although really it seemed of average size and power) request for another seventy five cents helped me decide to be on time to pick the kids up from school. I ask how it was back in the routine. “Awesome!” This kid has a great life. I let him know I need to stop and get dog food on the way home. “Awesome!” Okay, now I’m getting suspicious (I know you quit buying it the lunch bit). I get home and commence parenting. Hit your homework now and Mom can check it when she gets home and it will be perfect to turn in tomorrow. “Awesome.” Now my feelings are just plain hurt. This kid doesn’t want to move and lose his friends and grandparents. He doesn’t want to get up early and feed goats and milk chickens (I said I wanted a farmhouse, I never said I knew jack shit about it). I go into the kitchen and see if I can find something to cook as glum and my outlook (do I still have time to poach chicken and cream squash?) Luckily I can cook and wallow simultaneously. I feel little arms in a hug around my leg. Halo and freckles at hip height. “Dad, Iowa really is awesome.”

~Jeff

Iowa…I wonder too

I have a lot of really great friends. I never want for someone to meet for a beer of cup of coffee, for someone to share in the joy of my children’s exploits or even for the feeling that someone is there for me when things turn for the worse. I am happy that they are all interesting, nice people with varied outlooks and experiential bases and it makes my enjoyment of them more complete. The amazing thing about their unique and broad spectrum of personalities is that they all share one common question to me…”What the hell is this Iowa thing?” Sometimes it is a query of intrigue, sometimes of sarcasm but almost always has an undertone of sheer bafflement. I don’t know that I have ever been able to answer it to anyone’s (or even my own) satisfaction. I believe this because of the lack of commonality in their replies – “You mean like in Green Acres”, “I had a friend who lived in Nebraska”, “I’ve driven through there” and maybe the most honest…”Yikes!”

Like Claire (“Answer the question, Claire”) I want to answer the question but I don’t know a way to answer it that will be satisfying to my inquisitors and keep my social standing in place. So I guess the best way to proceed is to spew forth a series on unrelated images and thoughts that have somehow gelled in the fuzziness of my brain to make Iowa into a Garden of Eden for me.

1. Pie. Anything truly great starts with pie. Even drug store snack bars and gas stations there sell homemade pie. 
2. Beauty is simple. Rolling hills unfold in corn and barns and trees, unadorned and breathing. 
3. You can live the American Dream. You can buy a house with even an average job. 
4. They have parades and people go. It may not be Gary, Indiana. Heck, there might not be 101 coronets in the entire state, but they can celebrate with friends and not riot. 
5. My son will have similar chicken-freaks to cluck with. 
6. I saw an autumn changed oak that was so amazingly ablaze I know God created it. 
7. Cities and towns start and end. You live in town or out of town. 
8. They build new schools to better educate their kids. 
9. The weather is bad. I feel like we’ve gotten very soft and don’t respect nature the way we should. I can be hot or cold for awhile. 
10. It is really quiet. Not less noise quiet. Not the-construction-has-stopped quiet, but “make a noise so I can hear something” quiet. 
11. Barns are the coolest structures on earth. Born of necessity and seldom developed beyond utility….And red is pretty. 
12. Things are still grown and built and manufactured there. 
13. I don’t know that Iowa ever had a heyday (or if it did it was so long ago that it has left the common psyche). There is no sense of “The next big thing” coming to the rescue or grab hold of before it’s gone just a thankfulness for what you have and a pride in how you care for it. 
14. People can smile about the “Hokie” parts of their town. Tell you the things they don’t have with love in their voice. 
15. It’s not Nebraska. 

There probably isn’t anything that will make my friends feel I’m any less crazy for considering Iowa. For vacationing in the corn when I could afford the beach. For selling my house in the most killer location in Denver. For leaving family and friends collected over a lifetime. But I look forward to seeing them after awhile and telling them what my new home doesn’t have…And smiling.

NOW SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR PIE.

~Jeff

Changes are coming

I'm ready for a change. I know this is strange but I want to move to Iowa. I know, everyone says "Why Iowa?". I can't really explain it except to say that I think it fits my personality. About 15 years ago, I went on a business trip to Des Moines. I flew into Omaha and met up with some co-workers and we drove the remaining 2 hours into Iowa. It was spring time. It drizzled a little as we were driving in but I thought it was beautiful. I know it's going to be humid in the summer and crazy cold in the winter.

Not that it explains why I want to move to Iowa, but it helps to understand that I've never really lived anywhere else besides Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins. Every time we've considered somewhere else, we come back to how great it is here. And it is. We have a lot of family around. We live in a pretty good neighborhood in a pretty good house. We have good friends and decent schools here. I have a good job in Boulder. Life's pretty good. We're a little overextended financially for my personal comfort but all things considered, not bad. I just want a change.

So our next step is to sell our house in the spring. It's not exactly the best time to sell a house, but (knock wood) houses in our neighborhood are still moving. Lots to do to prepare. But we'll get there!

~Sandi