by jphilo | Oct 18, 2010 | Out and About
Yesterday afternoon the weather was October bright and sunny, perfect for a drive to northwest Iowa. There are plenty of state highways that wind from where I live to where I needed to be, plenty of ways to vary the route. But most of the highways in that part of our state are two lane roads. Which means the speed limit is 55, practically crawling along.
But this time of year, in a state covered with drying soy bean and corn fields ready for harvest, 55 miles an hour is a luxury on dry, sunny, October days. Slow-moving vehicles – combines, tractors pulling grain wagons full or empty, and grain trucks – crowd the highways as the farmers scurry to harvest the fruit of the past year’s labor.
Stuck behind the giant farm machines, I had time to observe the activity in the fields. Combines ate rows of corn in giant mouthfuls, spitting the golden kernels in the wagons following in tandem. In other fields, the bounty already devoured and carted away, farmers steered tractors down stubbly rows, disking the rubble into the black dirt.
Trailing behind lumbering, clanging wagons, I took in the last, mad, magnificent gasp of fall. Milkweed pods were bursting open in the ditches. Blossoming mums created splashes of bright color beside farm houses and barns. Grain dust turned the sunset pink and lovely. Trees glowed gold and red and orange along the banks of wayward cricks and streams. The rustling, crackling ditch grasses swayed in the light breeze.“Slow down,” they whispered. “You move too fast. Got to make the moment last.”
Calmed by their soft whisper, I patiently plied the breaks. Smiling, I hummed a little Simon and Garfunkel under my breath, and relished the drive.
by jphilo | Mar 30, 2009 | Reviews
Home is Marilynne Robinson’s second book about in a small Iowa town. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning first book, Gilead, bears the name of the fictional town populated with characters as ordinary and flawed as all of us. But the beauty of Robinson’s language and her love for those she writes about elevates their ordinary lives and their flawed relationships into a graceful dance.
In Home, the author makes Jack Boughton, a minor player in Gilead, the central character. Reverend Ames, the previous story’s main character, is given a minor, crucial role. The story is told through the eyes of thirty-eight-year-old Glory, Jack’s youngest sister, who has come home to heal from a love affair gone wrong and care for Robert Boughton, her dying father. Jack is the prodigal son, a charming scamp since birth and a hopeless alcholic, who comes home for the first time in twenty years, to see his father.
The action is as slow as a lazy Iowa summer, and the characters are as rich, satisfying and fleeting as sweet corn in July. Best of all, Robinson takes the aspects of the Christian faith most difficult to reconcile with the realities of life – suffering, broken relationship, bondage to sinful, self-destructive behavior – and through her flawed characters reveals the unconditional love of God.
Home is not a page-turner. Read it slowly. Sadly satisfying and best read with plenty of tissues handy, you won’t read the last page and close the book with a happy sigh. Instead, you’ll ponder why a book so sad and haunting ends as it does. And you’ll ponder why it brings such comfort to your soul.
by jphilo | Mar 25, 2009 | Daily Life
Last Friday, our son gave us a tour of his workplace south of the Twin Cities. The weather was as cold and windy as the picture suggests. The whole experience confirmed Garrison Keillor’s description of early spring in Minnesota. He said if winter had a hangover, it would be March.
The last few days in central Iowa haven’t been much better. We’ve more rain than we can handle and more wind than we want. It’s been cold enough to force people back into the winter coats they gleefully stuffed in the closet when the weather grew teasingly warm for a few days. The forecast for the weekend sounds grim – rain with a little snow mixed in, which is too much snow when April’s on the horizon.
The best thing about March weather in Iowa and Minnesota is that it’s not as bad as Dakota weather. Those states have been slammed with enough rain and snow to make a non-native quit and move away. But Dakota ranchers are tough even though their weather hangover often stretches from March through May.
Why people stay there, I’ll never know. But they do, and I’m glad because thinking of their circumstances move me to gratitude for Iowa’s early spring. No matter how bad things get here, it’s worse on windblown, snowy Dakota pasture where some rancher is herding some belligerent heifer into a sheltered draw so he can stick his arm into her womb and pull a calf.
Digging out my winter coat looks pretty good compared to that.
by jphilo | Dec 14, 2008 | Out and About
A winter moon, bright and full, shown above us as we left the monastery early yesterday morning. It escorted us down the mountain, along steep and winding roads, as the headlights of the car illuminated the heavy, snow-covered branches bending over us.
The moon followed us to Interstate 64 , past refineries with belching smokestacks and into the rolling, white-fenced pastures of Kentucky. For two hours, the moon hovered above us, until the sun rose, pink and quiet behind us.
“What is this like for my son,” I wondered as the moon faded and the sun gains strength, “Driving away from one life and toward the next? What must he be thinking? How can he do this?” We drove all day, and he gave no indication of qualms or second thoughts, and we arrived home at nine o’clock last night.
This morning, I was three steps outside the door when I stopped to take this picture. The moon, the tiniest bit smaller than it was yesterday, hung above the trees along our driveway in the rich blue morning sky. It had followed us from West Virginia to Iowa. I basked in this assurance that some things will stay the same, no matter where my child goes: the sun will rise and set, the moon will wax and wane, God’s sovereign hand upon him, and my love and prayers for his new life.
Some day, when he’s settled in an apartment, a framed copy of this photograph will be my housewarming gift. When he asks me why I called it “Faithfulness,” I’ll remind him of the moon that followed us from West Virginia to Iowa and of the sovereign God who created it.
