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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.

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