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I Belong
Driving down the Bluegrass, a two-lane, East-West highway that darts out of Ottumwa Iowa, I always feel my heartbeat change its rhythm. No matter what I’m doing, whether it’s reading in the backseat, arguing with my sister, or driving, at the point where we hit the Bluegrass, the pulse slows. I look out my window and watch as the small hills and farms of Southern Iowa roll by until we reach a bright orange gate which is always open, inviting the car into a world of complex communities and relationships.
This gate leads to a plot of land owned by my grandparents. Inside the gate lies an airport, an office, a house, and thick woods. My ideas of ecology define this place. Ecology being “concerned mainly with interactions or interrelations between organisms and the animate and inanimate environments in which they live” (Krech 22). And this plot of land has become a system of relationships. It is here where I have learned what home is. Not a place, not even people, but layers of connections and relationships that start at a place’s foundation and work its way up through the people, connecting them all in one overlapping balance where I can feel a sense of belonging.
Traveling the curving path of the gravel road, slowly inching away from the modernity of highway, we bypass the office and the airport. Visits there come later, family is the first stop. As we approach the house, it hides behind trees and hills, flitting behind these things, ghost-like until the last curve is rounded. The roof comes into view, slashing to a firm point at the top, as one side slopes lower than the other. As the last stretch of road is driven the square block of the rest of the house comes into view. I am always in awe as we approach. The small house holds so many memories. Wood-planked porches decorated with flowerpots, porch furniture, and usually a dog or two buttress the front and the back of the house. The porches are centers of activity, for congregating, for reflecting. They hold the house together, bringing its occupants to engage and live in small clusters as they observe the world around them. A system all their own entwined into every aspect of the place around them. It is one of the few places I can mingle without trepidation. I am not an outsider on this porch.
Trickling inside after communing on the porch I am greeted by a world of uniqueness, untouched by the technological advances of the past few decades. It is a place of slow, deliberate change. Just a few years ago my grandparents got a new TV and a new antenna (they can’t get cable way out here), and a VCR, which has yet to be used with any regularity. My Grandparents first microwave is only a few years old, and it sits with the outdated toaster oven on the white kitchen counters. Modernity has yet to encroach too much in this house. I enter this world and fancy myself stepping back in time, into a place I’ve always wanted to go.
Despite a few superficial changes here and there, one thing in the house that has not even remotely changed, and I have a feeling never will. The bright orange carpet that blankets everything except the kitchen and the basement stands out against the homey, understated décor of the rest of the house. The carpet has faded somewhat over the years of wear and tear, but it is still the same sixties orange it was at its installation. In any other place I would probably find it hideous, but here it fits. It has always been there. I never even questioned its aesthetic appeal until recently. Trying to explain the house to a friend, I mentioned orange carpet and noticed the look of horror on her face. Seeing it through her eyes, I could see how awful it might seem. But to me it means familiarity, it means safeness. It isn’t necessarily beautiful, but considering that my childhood was littered with over twelve different carpets and houses, the orange carpet here has always offered me something recognizable, something comfortable, a sign of home. I am comfortable here because it is still the same at its core. I connect with it in a way I cannot with my own homes, which have never been stable, never been the same. I relate to its stability forcefully.
The house itself is not a center for activity. Most of the excitement here takes place outside. In the warm months we congregate as a family on the porches, tour Grandma’s gardens, or hike in the woods. When a plane flies by the men, all pilots, rush to the doors, windows, or the porch to identify the type and its pilot. I do not run to the door. I was never taught which plane was which or belonged to whom. Grandma had me pour over Wildflowers of Iowa Woodlands, memorizing the bright glossy pictures and their bold titles. And as we hiked she would test me on my identification. If there is question over the identity of a wildflower, I am there. The men have their planes, the women their flowers, and I have learned my place well. I trail after my Grandma and Mother, listening to the identifications and diagnosis of plant diseases in Grandma’s garden. I beam proudly when I can identify a wildflower that my Mother cannot.
I am, after all, my Mother’s daughter. I am like her more than I ever wanted to be and that, perhaps, is where the desire to one-up her comes from. We are alike forces clashing, both stubborn, opinionated, emotional and irrational. Here, at Grandma’s, I see our relationship in a new light. I see our relationship mirrored in the one was she has with my Grandmother. My Mother, who attempted to cut all ties to the traditional, to her own Mother’s way of life, has become the housewife, the educated gardener (though she still disdains the wildflowers my Grandmother and I cling to). It is then I see how, in my own way, I attempt to cut ties with my mother by clinging to what she cut. Iowa, her mother, wildflowers, building a strong relationship with everything she attempted to leave behind.
As I slowly mature, leaving teenage angst behind, I come to realize all this and seeing it helps ease some of the resentment, some of the clashing. My Mother had me at a relatively young age and that has allowed us to grow up together, in a way. As she began to embrace the things she swore to leave behind, I began to embrace her, embrace our similarities and flaws as best I could. As Grandma passes eighty, and becomes less and less healthy every year, my Mother and I have begun to bond over our grief, over having to watch it happen. As she comes to accept that her Mother did the best she could, I begin to accept that mine did too. And in that acceptance I find peace in a place I have always known with two women I have always known. Three generations finding a way to accept and love each other is as much of this place to me as the gardens.
Unlike the clashing I’ve had with my mother, my Grandma has always been my lifeline. I am the oldest of three girls. My Grandmother is the oldest of five children (three boys and two girls). My birthday is April 24; my Grandmother’s is April 23, sixty years earlier. When I was a baby, before I can remember, my Grandma babysat me while my mother finished up her degree and my father worked full-time at a jewelry store. As eldest to eldest, April birthday to April birthday, Grandmother to eldest grandchild, we have bonded. My Grandma is stability where my life has been a series of uprootings and transplantations. She and her home have been the permanence I have always longed for in my day-to-day life. Grandma has always been there, and so has her home.
Sunsets belong to my Grandma and me. We walk up the gravel road that winds over a hill and to the highway. We usually only make it to where the “road” splits, one way going to the highway and the other heading to the office. We walk, very slowly, as the dogs trot and play around us. The sunset glows in the West, to our right, slowly sinking behind the trees, and if it’s the right time of year the Cottonwoods shower us with their fluffy white seeds. Grandma and I talk sometimes, we’re quiet others. It is ritual, it is connection.
In the summer we sit on the front porch and watch the colors blaze and shift as the heat hangs around us. I listen to the birds, identifying the bobwhite and the whippoorwill. We rock in our porch chairs, idly pet the dogs that lay at our feet, as the faint smell of clovers drifts by.
In the winter we sit on the couch and watch through the window as the sun blazes orange, pink, lavender, and then fades to darkness. I don’t know quite how the ritual itself started or why, but I can’t look at a sunset and not think of my Grandma, or dogs, or the image of the sun falling behind the hill of trees. Sunsets have become a bond, a circle between me, the sun, and Grandma.
My favorite time of year there is mid-spring. It brings out the connection I feel with the land, when the air has finally grown warmer and all of winter has melted, leaving the world muddy and dripping, the bright green of the new grass contrasting with the moist, black soil. It’s slick and the wetness seeps through any layer of protection. Hiking is difficult, falling a given.
Everywhere flowers bloom, their light green stalks giving way to colors. Iowan wildflowers are not gaudy, not bright, look-at-me flowers. They hide in grasses, in woods, peeking shyly out from their protection. The small, delicate, white Spring Beauties gather in patches and bloom to show slim lines of dark pink stretching from their centers. Sweet Williams bloom all along the woods, showing off their five lavenderish-blue petals as they peer out from behind the foliage of the woods and give off a charming, spring-like scent. Buttercups, small, hidden, bright yellow petals that always look slick, grow by the creek bed, only blooming on the wettest days of spring. Violets: yellow, purple, and white dot the green hills. Blue bells, hiding in their special patches that only Grandma, and now I, know about, droop, purple and blue. There are butter-and-eggs dotting the gravel road, small yellow flowers that look nothing like butter or eggs. Grandma says it’s a weed, but then guiltily admits that most wildflowers are considered weeds as well. My favorite spring wildflowers are the Dutchman’s Britches, a strange white early-spring flower that look like puffy pants hanging upside down on a laundry line.
Every spring Grandma has a small vase (usually an old jar) of these flowers on the kitchen windowsill, and when we grandkids are around she digs out all her vases and we fill them to the brim with an array of whites, pinks, blues, and yellows as we put the vases on the tables and across the mantle. Of course, there are certain flowers we know not to pick. The white Dog Tooth violet is a rarity, along with the green Jack-In-The-Pulpit, which I’ve only caught glimpse of once. We excitedly announce their presence and gather round to inspect these scarce plants, but we know to leave them alone in hopes that they will repopulate and once again grow as frequently as the violets.
Spring to me is wildflowers at Grandma’s. It is about sharing knowledge and knowing a place down to the name of its plants. It comes down to relating, listening. As Terry Tempest Williams suggests in her book Red, “our capacity to face the harsh measures of life, comes from the deep quiet listening to the land” (17). So I listen to the birds calling, the winds rustling the grasses and flowers, and by listening I feel connected to the cyclical world that begins with the wildflowers.
The search for wildflowers often ends with a hike up to Grandpa’s office. No visit to my grandparent’s is complete without a trip to this land of gray metal buildings and old-fashioned planes. Grandma has tried to detach her home from it, but both leak over the circles of relationship. Planes soar overhead back at the house as much as at the airport itself while Grandma makes sure her flowers are planted along the buildings of the office. Grandpa’s aviation magazines line the walls of the basement, while my Grandmother’s decorative touch is firmly ingrained in the cultivated landscape.
The office is set down in the middle of a small plot of land known as the Antique Airfield, abyproduct of the Antique Airplane Association, all of which are my Grandfather’s creations. My Grandfather is now seventy-eight years old, and except for a few recent health problems that have kept him homebound, he walks or drives up to the office every day but Sunday. He is still the president, the owner, the head honcho, and I’m not sure retirement will every really be in his future. His dedication to this place is clear in its proximity to his home, in his obsession with planes, in his refusal to retire.
The Antique Airfield is unique, a place of living history, engine grease, dogs, cement, grass, and trees. And despite its connection, it is a world unto itself. The office, the hangers, the museum, the library, the runway, all make up this small community solely dedicated to aviation. The airport is directly off the highway, a mile up from the house. It is a world of cement and gray contrasting with stretching fields of green and the deep cluster of trees that create a faux physical separation between the airport and the house. The airport is the mechanical blending with the natural and the old with the new as brand new 2003 Sedans sit in a gravel driveway while planes from the twenties and thirties taxi down the grass runway. In the middle of green, fertile, Iowan farmland no one really expects a cluster of gray buildings. Few people anticipate, on a nice day, brightly colored antique planes whizzing overhead and resting on the fields of grass that act as runways, the only division of field and landing strip coming from brightly colored orange cones, visible from the sky.
The main office is my favorite place. The smallest of the buildings it sits center in the airport, facing the highway and acting as nucleus, holding the rest of the office together, much like my Grandfather does. On entering the building one is greeted with cement floors and a series of glass cases that offer magazines, patches, and other various airplane memorabilia for sale. Its shelves are littered with ploys for membership and enticements to return. Of course, the real enticement is my Grandfather, his knowledge, his ease with people and dedication to the preservation of his past. This is what draws people, and myself, back. He seeks to connect visitors through flight.
Behind the glass cases, up a narrow, cement staircase is my Grandfather’s office. It smells of cigar smoke and old magazines just as the basement back at the house does. One wall is a window seat and a large window that looks out across both runways. In the winter when the trees are bare the point of the roof of the house can be seen. Grandpa is the king ruling high over his kingdom, though I have never seen him sit there and look out the window. He is usually at his desk that faces the right wall, hunched over papers or leaning back in his chair as he talks on the old fashioned rotary phone, hard at work. The dogs lay in various positions at his feet and Colby, the Queen, stretches out on the window seat.
What I love most about this place is how the buildings are cool in the summer. How plane enthusiasts gather around my Grandpa. How everyone seems to know one another like a community, no matter how long or short the duration of their stay. How, as granddaughter to the Bob Taylor, I hold a spot of honor somewhere. How the dog claws clack against the cement floor as they trail behind my Grandpa like a harem.
My Grandfather has an intense relationship with his dogs. It has turned into a long-running joke in my family. My mother calls him the dog whisperer. These dogs eat people food more than dog food, and on certain days my Grandfather even packs them their own lunch along with his.
One Christmas after his favorite dog had been put to sleep, he sought free puppy ads in the paper; he found one and I soon remember being bundled up in the back seat of his old Monte Carlo the day after Christmas. I remember that as Grandpa navigated icy roads and nasty weather, Grandma complained about his insane attachment to dogs and how it would end up being the death of us. He never says no to a dog. He has always taken in strays. Whenever a dog shows up he starts feeding them with the rest, and they usually stick around. Over the years dogs have come and gone, showed up, died, run away, etc. There have been at least twenty I can remember, the most at one time being six. However, now, there are only two. Colby, the dog picked up on the icy December night, and a stray named Brownie. Daisy, a Labrador, is my cousin’s dog, but more often than not spends her time with my Grandpa’s dogs, eating my Grandpa’s dog food or leftovers.
Grandpa loves each and every one of his dogs as if they were his children. When he is away for more than a day, he often insists on calling my Uncle and having him put Colby on the phone. Whether it is a joke or done out of seriousness is not quite obvious. On my Grandparent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, my Grandpa walked down the stairs in the morning and offered a “Morning, Colby,” before he even acknowledged my Grandmother sitting on the couch. As my Grandmother wryly noted, the dogs come first in his world.
There is a dog “graveyard” on the low hill in the back, behind the lilac bush and the water tank, before the line of trees start. A gravestone, rectangular, flat and gray with the name Rose engraved on it, sits in the middle of the hill. Beside her is a pile of logs that marks the grave of her son, Tipper, and on the other side is one of Colby’s sons, Goggles, who was hit by a car. It is a morbid little spot, a testament to how much my Grandfather cares about his dogs. I myself have put flowers and other decorations on the graves, or cleaned and weeded around them. I’ll sit, remembering times when I was younger and would talk to the group of dogs as if they were people or remembering the time my sister, cousin, and I got lost in the woods and the dogs stayed with us the whole time, though they undoubtedly knew their way back.
Though the dogs change every year, they are a constant. There is always a dog to greet me as I pull up the gravel road. In the winter, there is always a dog scratching to get in, and always my Grandpa obliges, no matter how much my Grandma complains. And because of my Grandfather’s intense love of dogs, I share that love. It has become a relationship I can carry with me wherever I go. Grandpa to dog, me to dog, and in turn me to Grandpa.
At the end of the day, this section of land is where my dreams most often take place. I wander around my Grandmother’s while strange, dream-like things happen. Subconsciously I am there. When I write fiction, my stories are usually set in the house without realizing it. I just automatically imagine my characters there because each character is a part of me, and so we both belong. The place (all of it: house, office, land) has become a place of understanding and growth. It is a stronghold in my life, stability, a place to enjoy my family, a place to live, and the one spot I feel truly at peace. I am at peace because I belong. I belong to a series of complex, overlapping circles I can crawl into, become a part of. I shed the role of outsider with no history, and with each visit I fit into a niche where each of our histories combined. From the wildflower to my Grandma, I belong.
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