the edge of Iowa

I don't know much about prairie grasses, technically speaking. Some tall, reedy and tasseled plant made a happy home in my mother's abandoned marigold bed when I was four or five. My little sister and I ran the stray grasses through our chubby fingers and deemed the grains we rubbed off wheat, having every belief that the plants had relatives in our grandmother's field that eventually became the flour for the bread in our peanut butter sandwiches.

Soft hills draped with tree groves and the same prairie grass line the edge of Iowa, where I've spent the last four months surviving. A quarter of a lifetime later and a whole state away from the Minnesota marigolds, I've accumulated no more real knowledge about my surroundings.

It took me until two weeks ago to find the points in the nearby state park that overlook these last lush hills before the great flatness of the Dakotas. Sturdy benches of industrial brown plastic almost give the spot the feel of a secluded cemetery for urban sophisticates to admire the land that hasn't yet been turned under for a Super-Walmart or an industrial park. But I do my best to only look forward, and I try to see the undisturbed flood of maples and birches and winter wheat with the eyes of ancestors who found their lives in the earth. Those who found peace in the sounds of wind in the cottonwoods and chirping crickets. Those who knew the taste of dirt and understood it belongs under your fingernails.

For the renewal they bring me, these Iowa grasses might as well be the staple ingredient in Mom's hearty brown bread. Something in my blood drew deep content from similar scenes over a century ago, and even now the sight feels curiously much like a homecoming.