Midwestern Wanderer

"Agriculture, Alcohol, Loneliness, and Other Motifs of the Midwest," is the title of an essay reviewing a favourite literary journal of mine.

Without reading the article at all, the title stayed with me.

I mean, this is what people think of the Midwest. Not a question. This is what I think of the land I live in. This is my landscape. Living here for the last twenty years has not changed my opinion of the landscape. I wrote a poem that sums up these feelings- lust, dust, and rust. Things dissolve into each other. 

I am having a really hard time finding subjects for my photography assignments. Right now, real life is dreary and blah. Browns and muted yellows against a grey sky. The house is messy, the kids are restless, I spend my afternoons writing in a grocery store cafeteria or next to a pile of laundry in my bedroom. Sometimes I imagine that pile suddenly animating like the Trash Heap in Fraggle Rock to give me advice and foretell my future, "There is more laundry to be washed! Always!" Then collapsing back into a heap of unfolded clothes for me to fret and worry over instead of writing. Like right now.

The loneliness and the dreary dead landscape view out my window is enough to nudge me toward the Scotch bottle for sure. Fulfilling the Midwestern legacy put forth by the article title. I resist and instead fill my cup with little cinnamon candies and plough on, word after word.

When I was sixteen and living in a small town in Illinois where everyone pretended to actually be from Chicago when they moved on to college out of state, my father told me we were moving to Iowa. My friends joked that my days would be filled with cow tipping and riding escalators for fun and that I would grow fat eating corn. Which is funny, considering that the town I moved from is more rural than the city I moved to in Iowa (Des Moines), though the year I moved here there were some unfortunate news headlines about teenagers riding escalators at the mall and getting clothing caught in the teeth of the moving stairs. Funny.

The Midwest sure is a strange place to live.  A landlocked, wet prairie, desolate, beautiful place to be exiled in. I have said this before, that I feel like mermaid stuck on land, homesick for something unattainable ever again, or maybe for something I have never known. Still, I am coming to this thought, unravelling at the seems, and wondering if maybe this homesickness and heartbreak I feel isn't for a physical place, but rather a yearning to be accepted by a place. I have spent the last year travelling all over and not once did I land my feet on the ground in a place that felt more like home, than my own farm. I had moments of bliss and beauty, vistas and magical places to roam, but never did I feel more loved and safe and beautiful than in my husband's embrace.

This was driven home to like a steak knife to my heart, in a bar in Prague, left alone at the table with another academic who was completely ugly drunk. He was pushing at me, asking why my husband would let me travel alone, why would I travel half way around the world if my bonds were secure and sacred? This is certainly an interesting question, even out of the context of this drunk stranger trying to get me to go home with him for the night. Why would my husband let me travel on my own? He could not stop me, not with pleas nor violence. I am my own wandering soul. He knows that and encourages and nurtures my dreams. Why would I go? Because I need to see. I need to climb to the top of a thousand year old church and breathe in the history and pray and be. I need to walk twenty miles until my shoes fall apart. I need to place my feet where revolutions have shaken the foundation of centuries of tradition, baptised in blood. Touch the bones that are said to cure blindness. I need to wander physically. My heart does not. My heart is with my family, sacred and secure, and I bring my stories and photos home to them. I am tethered by my heartstrings and my devotion and without that, would be completely lost.

And the evening ended with me threatening to gut the drunk bastard with my car keys if he dared try the grabby hand thing under the table again. You don't mess with a Midwestern farmer, even if she is on her own in a foreign country. I may have also made the threat in a Scottish drawl, strange as that may be. Goodness. I do thank the drunkard for the story though, without his terrible behaviour my last night in Prague would have been less story worthy, perhaps.  Less broken glass, at the very least.

And so, even though this place I am right now is dreary and cold, the food is fantastic and the present company close to my heart, always.