Skip to main content

Where the Soil is Deep

One house ago, when preparing to move to St. Paul
where Mari had taken a job at the University of St. Thomas
(The university, not the island!), during a seller's market,
I began to understand that we had an aesthetic measuring stick:
it was the farm house Mari grew up in, near Lake Mills, Iowa.

I am not sure what the style is called; Craftsman, perhaps.
It had to do with a fireplace-like mantle, the kind of woodwork,
and maybe even the size and layout of the rooms;
two-story, a basement, built a long time ago.

Last night, we drove to Lake Mills, where Mari and about half
of her high school graduating class met for a reunion,.
Lake Mills was probably once a thriving little agricultural town.
Today it is hanging on as a town. The farmland around the town
was once a lake. Today it is rich, rich farm land, drained.
There is a Country Club, and a casino out at Interstate 35.

As one of the spouses, I could see that the reunion was a homecoming.
Lake Mills, and the schoolbus-net of land around it, was home.
Even the people who had the good sense not to insist on staying home,
but who had settled in farther places, fought with their rising sense
that something they shared, during those years through puberty,
was the best time of their lives, even if there had been embellishment.

Even though some had not seen each other for years,
they knew that something that still shaped all of them
had its roots in Lake Mills, in an around what used to be lakes,
and what--here and there-- still were lakes. They knit the loose web
of memory together again with conversation, asking each other,
and reminding each other, of what they had been,
and assuring each other that the soil is deep in Lake Mills.

Truth is, though, that I do not want to live in that farmhouse.
Truth is, I grew up in a different house; but not a better one.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more