I turned 55 while I was in Iowa earlier this month. It was a good, low-key day spent with my family. Grabbing an early rise and a cup of coffee, I staked out space near Mom’s flower garden to read. At 6 a.m. the peacefulness was a deep hue, perhaps only deeper at dusk—for in the morning, the birds were chirping. Mom came out and wished me happy birthday; I thanked her for all of her hard work 55 years ago. I think mothers should get more acclaim when celebrating days of birth.
Before the humidity blossomed for the day, Mom, Dad, Bill, and I wandered around Mom’s tree lilies finding the tallest, the prettiest, the most colorful—snapping photos of all. Each paints a distinctive vista: the close-up of a lily versus Mom standing next to flowers in the foreground, seemingly held up by my family’s cornfield and the neighboring Amish farm in the background.
In some shots we cheated the scene; the lack of rain at Mom and Dad’s has left many of the tree lilies bending over from dehydration. We propped them up with our hands for the portraits. With the farm’s water source being a well, more than once Mom commented on rather having water for the livestock than for her flower gardens. She gives the baskets and planters a daily sip, but as for the her flower gardens, they are on their own.
Despite the drought, the field corn stood tall. Like the prairie grasses before it, corn shoots its roots deep into the earth looking for water. According to one Iowa State University study of corn roots, completed in 2016, when young plants in Northeastern Iowa had only four leaves, the roots were less than ten inches deep. However, as the summer progressed and more leaves grew, the roots reached maximum depths of 60 inches—growing downward up to an inch a day. The study also noted that once the roots hit the water table, they stopped growing. These facts make fictionalized stories like Jack and the Beanstalk a bit more magical. There’s much more to the story of a cornfield than watching the leaves, stalks, and tassels move in the wind and stretch up to the mid-day sun.
With the neighbor’s cornfield behind us, in the afternoon I set up a folding table in the yard under a maple tree, covered it with a split, black garbage bag, and hauled out the tie-dye kits from my “craft stash” in Mom and Dad’s basement. Tie-dye events never disappoint: people stick together side-by-side at their work stations, Mom and Dad join as spectators, color and design pursuits are briefly discussed, then the squirting of dye begins. We’re fabricating an end product in which we have no idea what it will look like as we dye material, sometimes deliberately and sometimes in an “oops-I-spilled” fashion. We’ve done this often enough that we know when there is an “oops” we just have to roll with it.
My 15-year-old Liam, proving to be the treasure trove of all Iowa trips, was the one who asked in May if we could tie-dye in Iowa in July, just like we had every summer that he could remember. A few weeks later, my 10-year-old niece also asked to tie-dye. As we set up the space, my son made one request, “Can we keep my shirt away from the brown dye, like what was on the socks we made for Grandpa two years ago?”
Why did I use brown on Grandpa’s socks? I vaguely remember the brown blob on Liam’s shirt that resulted from the unfortunate nestling of his freshly wetted shirt and Grandpa’s sock. Happily acquiescing, I put a clean, double-layered piece of newspaper down before Liam started work on his XXL t-shirt. After an hour’s work, we left the shirts under the tree to steep in bags until that night when, on a solo mission, I would rinse them all, take the bands off for the first glimpse at the designs, then wash and dry them. I propose this task as a job that I’m taking on. In reality, I’m selfish: I want to be the one to untangle these pieces of art for first viewing.
Earlier in the trip, I planted a notion with my family who lives near Mom and Dad, that on my birthday I wanted to go out for supper, for pork tenderloins. After a brainstorming of possible restaurants known for these fritters, we landed at Costa’s in Fairbank, Iowa. This dinner-plate sized tenderloin was one of the best I’ve ever had. Mind you, I’m sure I say that about every tenderloin sandwich I have when in Iowa!
This Iowa icon, the pork tenderloin sandwich, needs three pages in its own right to do it justice. After I published Cornfields to Codfish, I started making a list of topics I could’ve/should’ve included, and pork tenderloin sandwich was at the top. Yet even now, I can’t aptly explain the draw to this Iowa phenomenon; I feel I won’t do it justice if I try to write about it. (Until the time is right to write mine, this is a great article and recipe for this Iowa sensation. One note, the only condiments I ever have on this sandwich are ketchup and mustard, plus a big squirt of extra ketchup on the plate to dip into before each bite.) Iowa restaurants serving tenderloins are compared based on the size of the sandwich, as well as the quality. Dinner plate size like the one at Costa’s is wowing. Sometimes the pork tenderloin is more coating than meat, but the one at Costa’s was thick meat with ample coating.
I haven’t read the recipe directions in the link above. Like some of the recipes in my book, there are a few dishes that I’ve purposely not tried at home, for knowing how to cook them would be hazardous to my cardio health. Iowa pork tenderloins will remain in Iowa. For the time being.
At sunset, as my birthday came to a close, Will came outside to where I was rinsing t-shirts with the garden hose. I was doing this near one of Mom’s flower gardens so it would benefit from the day of tie-dying.
“Mom, the rash is back. I can’t stop itching!” It had first appeared 24 hours earlier.
We were flying back to Massachusetts the next day, and we had already tried over-the-counter ointments which worked sporadically. I examined the welts on his hands, arms, and legs; then I turned over the t-shirt duty to Mom; she had the honor of unwrapping the last two t-shirts. We don’t know what Will was allergic to, perhaps two weeks’ exposure to dust from the gravel roads, fur from taming kittens, tall grass, lake water. The doctor at the ER shrugged and ordered a steroid shot to calm the fury.
From the hospital, we drove fifteen minutes back to the farm through a rural countryside dotted with the silent yellow beeps of lightning bugs. They hung in the air above the deep ditches alongside the fields of corn. It was a real-life version of a 3D light-up birthday card.
