An Old Codger's Take

Chapter One

Iowa Farm boy

Iowans have some very unique traits. We live on flat land where everything is laid out in neat rectangles. Parts of Iowa are so flat that you could watch your dog run away for two weeks. From the air, the flat counties in Iowa look like giant quilts. The roads run straight along the section lines forming one-mile squares. Within these one-square mile sections are 640 acres of very productive and expensive land. Our farm fields are smaller rectangles within these one-mile squares. Farmers appreciate this kind of neatness and order more than most folks. When an Iowan goes to the big city and parks his pickup in the shopping center parking lot, he will take care to line the bumper up perfectly with the cars next to him and place it exactly in the middle of the parking spot. He can't help it. Our heritage is rural, and farm based. We understand about growing things in straight rows, straight fence-lines, machinery, the smell of manure and order.

In Iowa, we still appreciate our neighbors. After all, it snows in Iowa and you may need pulled out of a snow bank. And we still talk endlessly about the weather. We are forever seeking that perfect time when it's neither too hot, too dry, too wet, or too cold. And throughout Iowa's history, that time has never been found.

I came into this world a few days after D-Day. I was born at home since there was a war going on and hospital space was at a premium. The house my family lived in, at the time, had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. No, it wasn't a log cabin, just a typical drafty old Iowa farmhouse. When I was around four years old, my parents purchased the farm next to the place where we were living, and we moved about a mile down the road. The house we moved into was of tile block construction and had a full basement. It had two small bedrooms. My parents took one of the bedrooms and my two sisters got the other. My older brother and I had the unheated attic all to ourselves. The rest of the house was heated by coal and cooled by breezes, when available. Just outside our back door was a steel windmill that stood about 25 feet tall. The house had electricity to pump water, so the old windmill was repurposed into a TV antennae tower. The yard had two boxelder trees spaced about twenty feet apart. They were used to anchor each end of the no. 9 wire clothes line that was used before the advent of the electric or gas dryer. I don't know why any person in their right mind would plant a boxelder tree in their yard. In addition to attracting boxelder bugs, they are one ugly tree, more like a giant weed. There were also three peach trees and a willow tree in that yard. It seemed every farm that had children living on it had at least one willow tree in the yard. The reason might be more practical than esthetic. The Willow tree was also a giant switch factory. By switch, I'm not referring to the electrical variety. I mean the type you were told to go fetch when you were about to receive the ultimate punishment, a good switching. Willow trees were a living, growing parenting tool.

I had a typical farm-kid childhood. I worked. We had cows to milk, pigs and chickens to feed, beans to walk, hay to bale and all the other jobs that farm-kids were blessed with in the 1950's. I learned early to never let it appear like you didn't have anything to do. Idleness could not be tolerated in my family, and if caught engaging in it you were sure to be assigned some work. And there was an endless supply of work on that farm. I still can't sit down and relax in the middle of the day without feeling that fear of getting caught and being sentenced to hard labor.

When I was a kid on the farm, we raised pigs. Pigs have a unique aroma. To be honest, pigs flat out stink! Pigshit stinks worse than horse, cow, sheep or even chickenshit. But, contrary to what most people think, pigs are actually quite clean. This misconception of pigs being dirty comes from the fact that pigs that live in hot climates roll around in mud to cool off. Here's the dirt on pigs: They are perhaps the smartest, cleanest domestic animals known - more so than cats and dogs, according to some experts. But pigs don't have sweat glands, so they roll around in the mud to stay cool. I guess you could say, other than rolling around in the mud, pigs are quite clean. Also, pigs are one of the smartest domesticated animals – and are actually smarter than dogs! So, if Lassie had been a pig instead of a dog, Little Tommy might not have fallen into the well in the first place.