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Indelible Green


Green!  Let it be said:  Iowa is green!  Except in the winter when it is white.  

 The Broghammer farm, on the way out to our cabin, is a visual milepost.  Down, off the road to the south, looking over a cornfield that feeds greedily on the ridged nutrients shaved by a glacier from rich soils even farther north, and polished by ten thousand years of summer rain, the farmstead occupies itself from the center out.  

 It is as if the green of Iowa spent winters reading State maplines, determined to assault visitors at the boundaries with green:  the Mississippi River on the east, and the Missouri River on the west, the State of Missouri to the south, and Minnesota up north.  

 Iowa is not, as a journalist covering a Presidential primary once wrote:  a place with all the geographical interest of a rumpled bedspread.  Where our cabin is, Iowa is hilly, there where the glaciers came, and--the last time--did not come to shave down the land.  The last time, ten thousand years ago, the glacier divided, intending to lure a Norwegian farmer to something familiar:  a hillside farm; a green place.

 Mari was born in Iowa, a hundred miles west of where our log house is, from where the playhouse her father, Parnell, and grandfather Ellertson, built for Parnell's daughters and nieces has been moved to sit on a hillside at the cabin.  Per and I moved the playhouse, strewing the highway with things we forgot to tie down.  Even the playhouse shifted on the big trailer!  We put it back into place by backing into a big locust tree at our house in town, and did not tell anyone about it until we had wrestled it into place at the log house.  Patti and Mark helped us paint it Norwegian.  

 Part of Mari is Iowa green in a way that I have never been Washington State evergreen.  I have reluctantly come to admit that Iowa green is indelible.



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