![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jun. 19th, 2003 07:07 pmSo we are now in the thick of new-student orientation, and I am about as exhausted at day's end as I've ever been. ( A day in the life... )
Jun. 19th, 2003
Midwestern memory
Jun. 19th, 2003 09:15 pmIn the middle of typing my previous entry, the phone rang, and it was ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tazlet phoning from Baltimore, and we talked a while about anxiety, prairie dogs, monkeypox, work, aging, and the importance of finding one's true home, one's place of predilection.
After we hung up, I had a vivid sensory flashback, to a day when ... I must have been somewhere between six and ten, so it would have been in the late 50s or early 60s. My family was taking one of our regular car trips from Minnesota down to Kansas, to visit grandparents, and it was before the days of the interstate, so we were driving on two-lane blacktop. It was the height of midsummer, and we'd stopped to gas the car, somewhere in the middle of Iowa.
I remember the burning heat of the sun beating down, the suffocating humidity. (There was really no air-conditioning much of anywhere, in those days.) I remember the little two-pump gas station, in the middle of nowhere. I remember the billowing corn fields stretching out endlessly in all directions. I remember the smells of gasoline and manure, and the thick green smell of the burgeoning corn, and how the hot soft asphalt would yield, softly, under one's feet. I remember there were grasshoppers all over the place, jumping listlessly around on the blacktop. I remember going over to the ancient soft-drink machine--it was one of those ones built like a chest freezer, with a heavy lid you had to push up, and then you had to scan the metal caps on the bottles of pop contained therein, grab the one you wanted, and navigate it down the cast-iron channel to the spot where you could pull it up, through the iron jaws (temporarily released by the coins you'd dropped in), and then you'd pop the cap off with the opener built into the side of the machine. I can't remember what exactly I got--it might have been an Orange Crush, or an RC Cola, or maybe a grape soda...
Nowadays all you do is drop the coins in, push a button, and your bottle or can is delivered to you, in the out-bin, with a rattle and clunk--but in those days you had to work for it. The bliss of something cold and wet and sweet was a reward for toil, and a blessing, a moment of grace, in the unending heat and dust and glare of a midwestern summer.
I remember standing, in the heat and the smells of gasoline and manure, sipping my pop, somehow knowing (a brief flash of adult awareness) that this time would pass away, telling myself remember this.
And then we got back into the car--the old '54 Rambler station wagon. My mother would spread out a blanket in the back, and pillows, so that hours later, when it finally got dark, my two brothers and I could lie down and sleep, side by side, with the miles humming past, the darkened cornfields sliding by, my parents in the front conducting muted adult-type arguments, smoking cigarettes, the stars huge and hovering outside the windows, the smells of corn and manure and dust thick in the night air.
For all that I struggle against it sometimes, the midwest is my home, my place of predilection. The cornfields and wheatfields, the tornadoes and blizzards, the little river towns and the lonely country roads, the blazing heat and the freezing cold. I think if I had to live with less than a thousand miles of mostly-empty land on all sides of me, I might start to get claustrophobic after a while. I suppose it's a good thing to know where one belongs, as resentful as one might be about the knowledge.
tazlet phoning from Baltimore, and we talked a while about anxiety, prairie dogs, monkeypox, work, aging, and the importance of finding one's true home, one's place of predilection.After we hung up, I had a vivid sensory flashback, to a day when ... I must have been somewhere between six and ten, so it would have been in the late 50s or early 60s. My family was taking one of our regular car trips from Minnesota down to Kansas, to visit grandparents, and it was before the days of the interstate, so we were driving on two-lane blacktop. It was the height of midsummer, and we'd stopped to gas the car, somewhere in the middle of Iowa.
I remember the burning heat of the sun beating down, the suffocating humidity. (There was really no air-conditioning much of anywhere, in those days.) I remember the little two-pump gas station, in the middle of nowhere. I remember the billowing corn fields stretching out endlessly in all directions. I remember the smells of gasoline and manure, and the thick green smell of the burgeoning corn, and how the hot soft asphalt would yield, softly, under one's feet. I remember there were grasshoppers all over the place, jumping listlessly around on the blacktop. I remember going over to the ancient soft-drink machine--it was one of those ones built like a chest freezer, with a heavy lid you had to push up, and then you had to scan the metal caps on the bottles of pop contained therein, grab the one you wanted, and navigate it down the cast-iron channel to the spot where you could pull it up, through the iron jaws (temporarily released by the coins you'd dropped in), and then you'd pop the cap off with the opener built into the side of the machine. I can't remember what exactly I got--it might have been an Orange Crush, or an RC Cola, or maybe a grape soda...
Nowadays all you do is drop the coins in, push a button, and your bottle or can is delivered to you, in the out-bin, with a rattle and clunk--but in those days you had to work for it. The bliss of something cold and wet and sweet was a reward for toil, and a blessing, a moment of grace, in the unending heat and dust and glare of a midwestern summer.
I remember standing, in the heat and the smells of gasoline and manure, sipping my pop, somehow knowing (a brief flash of adult awareness) that this time would pass away, telling myself remember this.
And then we got back into the car--the old '54 Rambler station wagon. My mother would spread out a blanket in the back, and pillows, so that hours later, when it finally got dark, my two brothers and I could lie down and sleep, side by side, with the miles humming past, the darkened cornfields sliding by, my parents in the front conducting muted adult-type arguments, smoking cigarettes, the stars huge and hovering outside the windows, the smells of corn and manure and dust thick in the night air.
For all that I struggle against it sometimes, the midwest is my home, my place of predilection. The cornfields and wheatfields, the tornadoes and blizzards, the little river towns and the lonely country roads, the blazing heat and the freezing cold. I think if I had to live with less than a thousand miles of mostly-empty land on all sides of me, I might start to get claustrophobic after a while. I suppose it's a good thing to know where one belongs, as resentful as one might be about the knowledge.