I lived three years in Iowa, finishing my Bachelor's degree and getting my Master's. For much of that time I thought I was caught up in being young and not really paying attention--and yet, thinking back, walking into the delicate web of my memory, I can turn over an extraordinary amount of detail about Iowa and my time there, bits and pieces of a mosaic gleaming full and complete and in the background of my life, a richness of knowledge and habit permeating every moment I'm awake.
An oracle sent me to Iowa. Unhappy and wanting to write, I told a friend who said, "If you want to write, go to Iowa." Iowa? I didn't really even know where it was, or what connection an entire state could have to writing. Perhaps because of my complete lack of any other plan, I recognized my friend's advice for the divine intervention it was and so followed it—blindly, without a second thought. I simply applied and got accepted and packed my bags and showed up. Blind faith in a dream drove me there—it never occurred to me that I might not get in. When a TA suggested I apply for the Nonfiction Writing Program, I heard the voice of the oracle again—by then I'd learned creative nonfiction was the writing I'd always wanted to write, without ever even knowing it had a name.
In Iowa, I learned the universe supports my dreams if I have faith in it and them. I sent in my one essay and got accepted—and got an award, a scholarship, and an instructor's position. I learned I could be happy spending eight hours a day writing and researching. I learned, if I knew my subject well enough, it became magically transparent, giving me complete power over my writing—a miraculous occurrence. I learned when the lilacs bloomed all over Iowa City. I learned I did not like to do taxidermy. I learned what fairy rings are and where to find them, and where the beavers built their dams. I collected beaver sticks and found that, yes, pine trees on a windy day do sound exactly like the sea.
In Iowa, from the window of my third floor apartment, I was amazed to find I could watch, day by day, the slow transformation from winter to spring to summer through the hazy pink and red and yellow and green dappled cloud of flowering and leafing and light in the treetops. I watched the groundhog gorge himself on overripe mulberries fallen to the hot sidewalk, and the elderly Chinese man come every afternoon to pick ripe ones off the tree. I learned to love gin and tonic, learned the best thesis advisory sessions came with KFC and Coors at the Coralville Reservoir. I saw a rare and shy mink in the wild and I wrote more poetry than before or since. I spent hours driving home and back through the lion-yellow fields, windows open, warm summer air on my face—and swooped down empty streets in foggy fall sunrises, biking to my job cooking in the dorm kitchen. I read Confederacy of Dunces aloud to my long-suffering office mate and we laughed and laughed—I'm surprised he managed to get his PhD, sharing an office with me. But he was my companion for mushroom hunts and nature walks and long days of serene memories, my support as I tried to teach for the first time, my inspiration for working hard.
Lovesick boys wrote me songs in Iowa, I bought my first pottery there at an art show by the river, I ate the best cheesecake of my life, learned to poach a hundred eggs in one big pot of boiling water, to open champagne bottles, fast, one after the other, that bushes (full of a hundred sparrows) sang in the summer nights, that Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for blonds. I made my own butter, drank raw milk, got to know a herd of cows. I struggled with migraines, I delighted in hearing Galway Kinnell, I agonized over words, and reveled in the time I was given to write.
One day during my last month in Iowa I was walking to class as usual, down a pretty residential street lined with oak trees, headed towards the University Hospital where I always turned right to walk down the hill and across the river. Lilacs were blooming, I think, and all the late spring flowers. The air held the balmy clear warmth of May and the sky was blue and the entire town smelled like spring, all grass and lilacs and daffodils. I was thinking about leaving, about what I had to do before I left, when suddenly I felt an enormous sadness—a piercing sense I was leaving home. Home? I'd never felt this before. I'd never had to leave a place behind, without family to keep it anchored in my life—and I'd never before been in a place that felt like my home because I'd made it that way, because I myself had built a life there, because I knew it and loved all its familiar folds and scars and surprises and moods.
In Iowa, I learned I could write if I wanted to write. Years after I left that first time I went back, and took a workshop where I wrote more poetry and wrote more essays and learned, again, I could write if I wanted to write. Today, I sit with the hope of a way back to Iowa, to the physical place—but what I also learned in Iowa, in my memories of Iowa, is the lessons stay, the knowledge is mine, no matter where I am. I can go back any time and anywhere to the place that feels like home, where the lilacs bloom, where I know how to watch the subtle change of the seasons, where I know I can write, where I have faith in the universe and in my dreams.
