Golden hued white against the gradient halfblue
Comet tails of the anthropocene
Jets arc up out of Baltimore and DC
The glint of their skins lost in the crystalline winter southern sky
Over the Appalachians
Altitude so great as to become an abstraction
Passengers plying their way to Chicago, Denver or Los Angeles
Christmas presents wrapped and boxed in the hold
And on earth, at my kitchen table
I look out on the snow-covered lawns, breathing deeply
Banana bread and coffee fill the air
Different Soil
The land heaves to meet the sky
An arch of sandstone and limestone
Washed away by a quarter billion years’ rain
Among the scarred hilltops and ridged remnants
In a green valley in the wilds of Penn’s Woods
I sense the transience of my position
Where I come from I was certain
Of many things which are just as untrue
The words, clinging to the heels of my feet as I tread Iowa Avenue’s sidewalk
As you breathe, there, you feel them
Words pass through the membrane of your lungs
Dissolve in the blood and cross a barrier to saturate your being
Breathing here, the oxygen is the same
Knowledge and wisdom flow through the valley
But I miss the words
Differences Are Interesting
My wife and I just moved from Iowa to Pennsylvania. I was born in far northern New York, but we moved to Iowa when I was only a few months old. Although I’ve spent time in Europe and West Africa, I have never lived anywhere but Iowa for more than five months. I’m finding that what I miss the most is, obviously, seeing my close friends nearly every day, being able to visit my parents any time, and running in to people on campus who I know whenever I walk around.
I know that many of these things will change with time – I will know more people here, I’ll make new friendships, but my parents will still be far away. For me, that is really difficult.
I grew up in a small university city, and knew every road, location, pattern, sound, smell, image, time and context in intimate detail. I had walked or biked nearly everywhere in Iowa City, and that was comfortable. The sense of place and my sense of myself were deeply integrated. One of the most valuable things for me about going to school at Iowa was that in my spare time, I would get in my car and explore Johnson, Cedar, Washington, Henry, Lee, Linn and Iowa counties in extreme detail. I could drive out of town in any direction, for 200 miles, take any turn, and come back in to town from any direction I chose. I would often depart town in the morning on a Sunday and come back late at night, my pump primed to write new poetry for class the next day. Now I’m in a new small university city, but all those deep interconnections are missing. It will take a long time (possibly the rest of my life) to rebuild them here.
I like this place, I like the few people I already know here. I like the mountains, but I miss the gently rolling plains and the comfort of the way all the streets and roads are perfectly aligned to the cardinal directions. I miss knowing interesting historical details about the place I live, like why “Blackhawk Mini Park” is called that. I miss having a beer at Bo James or The Mill with friends. I miss driving past the airport where I learned to fly and remembering cleaning airplanes there with good friends who left town in the other direction a few years back.
I miss knowing that if someone had the last name Yoder or Swartzendruber or Stutsman, they were from the area.
I miss Kevin Olish, who died last year, suddenly, and was a familiar face and interesting guy at the Co-Op, always talkative, always with something interesting to say. Once, I was wearing a UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs t-shirt my dad had given me. Kevin said, “I used to live in Santa Cruz, nice town! Expensive town. I like it here better.”
I’m sure I will get to know all sorts of characters and characteristics here in Happy Valley. Over time, I’ll come to appreciate the unique aspects of life here. One of the things I like most so far is how genuinely nice and helpful most of the people I have talked to here are. That seems like a platitude, but it’s not. It’s deeply not. People here are, as far as I can tell, mostly just nice all the way to the core.