They make it look so easy, but I wouldn't live here.

I went for a walk yesterday. Iowa is flat.

3 blocks north and I ran into a soybean field.

4 blocks east I found a route out of suburbia. In some farm towns, the houses seem to be a desolate rock being pounded upon by the endless waves of corn and soybeans, and are slowly eaten away. In Eldridge, residential is on the offensive against agricultural, annexing farmland slowly enough that you wouldn't notice if you lived there.

New homes are springing up with the same uniformity as the row after row of corn stalks across the fence. It bears an eerie resemblance to a game of Sim City (Sim Farm Town?). In Tennessee, The Land is the boss, and tells the farmer where he's allowed to grow, and roads follow the contours of hills and streams. In Iowa, The Land is indifferent. You can plant wherever you want, and roads are a geometric grid.

I neglected to remember that a "country block" is usually about a square mile, so by the time I turned onto 255th Avenue, I had locked myself into a 4-mile stroll. Not a bad thing, I just had to dodge the occasional dust cloud stirred up by men in pickup trucks.

Oddly enough, I saw almost no gardens. In a land where plants are trying to grow everywhere, you'd think people would jump on the chance, but maybe a life consumed with farming is still too present in the collective memory. (I would've snacked on some of these day-lily buds, but the proximity to the inexplicably-placed port-a-pottys kinda scared me off)

Here's a picture from Grandma's wall. It's my parents' wedding (they were kinda hippies, dunno what happened).