A Place to Grow

It seems there are always a few bits of sublime which escape from the trappings of a midwestern girl's mind - and are recollected quite swiftly, I discovered today, through a drive down a highway in the Heartland...

...where it's green. And lush. Think resplendent, sun-kissed tops of trees trunked far longer than the generations of farmers tilling around them. These groves aren't the tall and proud of California or the pungent pricklies of Colorado; rather, these are the gnarly old men of the forestry retirement village, knotted with age but medaled with valor shown in the tales they tell of old.

...where it's moist. Yeah, on the blades of grass. In the molecules of air. And within every pore of skin.
They call it humidity: I call it a cruel sense of atmospheric humor.

...where it's smelly. Because of the soybean plants. And the cow pies. And the pig pens.
But it's not all foul: there's also the smell of fresh-cut grass and wildflowers and generally unadulterated, non-city, "desmogged" midwest tipped with tinges of sun tea and thunderstorms.

...where it's friendly. Five people...in a row...said, "Excuse me" for reasons I've yet to explain: I find myself heady, nevertheless, after the experience with comparatively utopian social behavior. Don't even ask me to comprehend the foreign craziness that lurks behind the random "Good morning"s thrown at me: good-manner overload! (Sorry, Colorado: you are lacking on this one).

...where it's history. It's my town - "where I was born, where I was raised, where I keep all my yesterdays" - and where I'm shoring up a few more with the next generation...like catching fireflies for the first time tonight.

In the weeks following, you'll be forced to endure an onslaught of photos documenting these very renderings but, in the meantime, I'll be pondering how the sublime really isn't when it shows you how you've changed, evolved, gotten bigger and (maybe) grown up, too.

Cuz I'm in I.O.W.A.

And it's "A Place to Grow".