Iowa City

July 6th

 Iowa City is a city.  I mention this because the first thing I noticed driving down Dubuque from I-80 was the blinding light tree of an ambulance parked ahead of my turn onto Brown Street.  Sirens were in the background off and on as I unpacked, and they felt out of place.  I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard sirens near a place I was about to go to sleep, which is funny, coming from such a place as NYC only a month ago.  Dubuque was a park on one side and houses on the other, empty at 11pm, save for the ambulance.  It felt slightly foreboding.

In the Smith's bed and breakfast, nothing could be more charming.  Found at the last minute while I ate dinner in Liberty Missouri.  I decided arriving at a campground at 11pm without advance reservations or familiarity wouldn't work.  I saw a picture of a pleasant victorian house in a row of the same with a porch, and pictured myself on it, writing and thinking deep thoughts.  Remarkably they had a room for me.

Smith's B&B. Just what I needed.

I worked in my room after a pleasantly unexpected breakfast of spinach frittatas and fresh fruit on the screen porch with a couple of women who were old IC High School friends visiting home to celebrate their divorces and a young Arkansas mom who was in town to do a 2-week yoga teacher training with a Baptiste senior student. All of us women in the midst of big transitions.

I've come to the point where the idea of "catching up" the blog entries will require an entire vacation in itself.  No long after leaving the Outer Banks I was spending so much time with people there wasn't a place for stealing several hours to go write.  I kept notes, but it seems to say anything more interesting than "I went here, then here, then here" in a coherent way requires at least 4-5 uninterrupted hours with a good internet connection, which was also problematic for several days. So I've made notes along the way and have been using the voice recorder while driving and will transcribe and post pieces about the trip as I get to them.

In less than 10 days I'll be interrupting my peripatetic summer for a 12-day group retreat at Karme Choling in Vermont.  It should be a great relief and a great joy.  When I left June 10th it was with the knowledge that I would eventually return, probably in the fall, as auspicious circumstances would undoubtedly emerge over the time of my travels and retreats this summer. Rather than accept a position that would be perfectly suitable but spiritually frustrating, we left the door open for something else to arise.

As I move from place to place the question in the background is where are the places I could live and flourish?  Who would I be if I lived in Lewes, Delaware, or Kansas City? Or Buhler? This is just one theme occurring during these travels, one that has followed me most of my adult life.  There are places I have visited that feel like they could be home, and others that don't, no matter how interesting they were to visit.

Buhler had a strong effect on my mind.  I imagined opening a retreat center in the farmhouse my sister and her husband are about to sell so midwestern contemplatives could enjoy the extreme peacefulness and wisdom present in the land there.  In buddhist language, the term for a well-practiced, settled mind is shinjang - to be "shinjanged" is to not be easily stirred up by external situations, to have equanimity in the face of frustration, passion, heartbreak, lust - whether one's own or another's.  Ultimately it comes from the understanding that we have everything we need - we are not faulty or incomplete, but whole and capable of connecting with that completeness.  We do not need confirmation from others, from institutions, or our own circumstances to know this wholeness that exists within us, even when we hear that usual voice telling us we need to eat better or get more work done.  The sky over Kansas is broad and endless blue, a reflection of all possibilities being available. Looking over the literal field of gold towards the tiny trees and white elevators of Buhler, the yard elms rustling in the wind, swallows tittering on the telephone wire, we know all of it - life, relationships, conflicts - is workable.

Hutchinson, where Ann works, and where she & Dan will be moving in September, is a quaint western town of 36,000 with a main-street /downtown life that is growing after a long period of downturn.  The old signs and shops are being "revitalized", the broad streets spruced with cultural events.  Hutchinson and a sister city, McPhearson, going the other direction from Buhler and a little busier, had a diversity of ages, backgrounds, and cultural gems, including good coffee bars, which seems to have become one barometer of livability in the places I have visited.  There, I would live on a farm but enjoy going into town, rather than the other way around.  I would certainly have a horse for crossing the fields and wandering off into the sand hills dotted with sage - riding seems the best way to enjoy the landscape there.

Unfortunately, I couldn't linger in Buhler's equanimity a few days more, as there would be too much road to take back on the return.  I left this western-most point of my trip forlorn at the prospect of never seeing it again.

All fantasy aside, now in Iowa City I've put 8 hours of road between me and that aerie.  I'm in the home of great writers and artists, the Iowa Writer's Workshop and University of Iowa, 90 miles east of Des Moines.  A friend's son recently finished his masters here and just moved back to NYC.  Pictures from his Mom's visits were landscapes; but sunrises over fields does not describe the city itself, which is a marriage of college town and frontier town.  Old photographs on the walls at Heirloom Salad Company show broad earth streetscapes peopled with town folks and farm folks and their carriages, more western than eastern.  The blocks are walkable length, unlike Chicago where they take ten minutes to traverse (or so it seems).  Huge churches hold the center; a mix of bungalows and houses; victorian through arts & crafts mostly, form the neighborhoods. The university to the west is knitted to the downtown on it's eastern edge, crossing the river in the process. I happened upon the Iowa City Jazz Festival, as well as the Iowa Summer Writers Workshop, so town was full of visitors and families enjoying the midway foods and all-day music on the main thoroughfare, in the 90 degree humid sun. I spent the day indoors once I walked downtown, first in the salad place, then in Prairie Lights bookstore - the inimitable writer's bookstore of the midwest; and finally in one of the upscale venues serving locally-sourced fare that makes up the trio of 128, Hearth, and Moonrakers restaurants.

St Mary's Church, Iowa City

College town midsummer: bicycles, 20-somethings, wiskers, pubs, sports bars, "halls", delis, bookstores, houses for rent, campus green, coffee shops, short shorts, sundresses, men in flip-flops, law enforcement officers carrying a globe made out of twigs and sporting baseball caps. Middle-aged single women moving from coffee shop to coffee shop with their laptops.  Hondas and Toyotas and Subarus. A reporter from La Prensa news visiting the Jazz fest with his wife and child , press pass dangling from the jacket tied at his waist.  Girls' hair twisted into topknots and ponytails. A loner tomboy wearing a black and yellow luau lei and a red backpack over black clothes. A summer ice rink made of soap like tiles…for real ice skating in the 90 degree heat.

"ice" skating at the Jazz Festival

I spent two nights at the Smith's, sleeping and writing, before heading 4 hours north to Minneapolis and a possible meeting with some long lost Lanning cousins…if I could reach them.

Smith's screened porch.