THE 'MIDDLE BORDER'
is a geographical term for the Midwestern prairie lands settled in the 1800's, made newly possible by the Homestead Act and improved river transport. It's also a literary concept; Hamlin Garland wrote two novels, Son of the Middle Border (1918), and Daughter of the Middle Border (1921), which contain the paradoxical phrase. Dreams of prosperity, romantic idealism, social justice and populist energy entwine with the harsh realism of physical toil, boom-bust poverty, and agrarian revolt. The tone is elegiac in these novels, but Social Realism is the bass that remains sounding even today. (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/Parrington/vol3/bk02_01_ch03.html)
"Rugged depictions of independent life with wide open space provided distractions for those in financial crisis...regionalism obscured the crucial forces of history...
providing entertainment for those realities facing oppressed peoples, said Meyer
Schapiro. (Wickipedia article on John Steuart Curry)
I think of the Middle Border as a tag for the fundament of a real place, a singular heartland, and a synthesis of the American Midwest perspective. Its point-of-view is decent, conservative, grounded, pragmatic, hard-working. It feels distant; all that flat prairie to the west of the Mississippi to be overflown before one even arrives. It's a Great Wall, the space muting and buffering the impact of coastal racket and rictus. One faces inland and inward, holding the myth that values and truths will prevail against the latest east and west coasts trendlines.
The Cedar River, approaching Waterloo Airport
Grant Wood, Stone City, Iowa
I was born in Iowa, a vanguard baby-boom child of two soldiers (Mom was a
WAC). The first twelve years we lived in a small Wisconsin town that served the
farm belt around it. As a child of the Depression, Mom had seen those orange crate illustrations of California, and never forgot them. They moved to Long Beach, California, called 'Little Iowa', following many others already settled there. As marvelous as is California, the change isolated them and left them increasingly homesick as the years went by.
My brother, Lanny, lives in Iowa this very day. After earning his doctorate, he returned to teach at the same Iowa university from which my mother graduated. He is an environmental scientist, the fruit of our childhood upbringing in a fecund, bountiful land of deciduous forests, plentifully filled lakes and rivers, and farms planted to fill American bellies. How we used to laugh over being "corn-fed"; a kind of embarrassed acknowledgment of the inherent blue-collar hick-ness of our world.
My Italian aunt and uncle were gene-bestowed with the ability to draw and paint, a most extraneous gift in the Midwest, but that's what I got; Lanny's bequest was a more evaluative, objective scientific nature. I stayed on the West Coast, in love with the weather and big city opportunities, but I do get to "go back home", and it feels like it's all still mine, deeply possessed in my identity. A very good place to be from, a good place to go back to.
When we go back, we explore the grids of roads, taking in wide sky, the magnitude of agri-business and factory. I never lived in Iowa, but in Wisconsin, and so for me it's new and familiar at the same time. I love vessels of regional character: lighthouses, restaurants, hotels, churches, main street, streetlights, old brick factories, and barns. It's all a lively connection, a certain vibrancy in body and heart, and now in reflection, too.
How I love this particular Charles DeMuth painting - the title referencing the granaries of ancient Egypt, of course. The moderne aloof structures seem
more like giant breast sanctuaries, the succor of safely-stored grain assured. Diagonal rays of light envelop and highlight them; they are protected from on high.
GRUNDY CENTER, IOWA - Central Counties Co-Operative
A cloudy, brooding day on a Sunday drive brought us to Grundy County, where cost per acre of rich Iowa earth is the highest in the state. I dreamed of finding silos
and barns but the silos are replaced by grain elevators, and the old red barns are mostly falling down, replaced by new metal structures that require less upkeep. The grain elevators still have the power of volume and containment, and so these photos are my visual accompaniment to The Middle Border's lyrics about the prairie world.
I guess everyone's heartland is a private state of mind. Of course, the problem is that all runs to kitsch, especially it seems, in the Midwest. There are more crocheted toilet paper roll covers per capita than anywhere else in the world, I'm told by reliable statisticians. Decorative objects are fashioned from the old, the found, an unwillingness to discard the past, a parallel of "rasquache", a distinctly Chicano style that was defined by a unique sensibility of repurpose, re-use, and ingenuity. A woman's output is "domesticana", a term I would use lovingly for much of the work I saw in Iowa.
THE BARN QUILT PROJECT is a lovely extension of all the best of American crafting, I think. It's appealing, colorful, and there's a natural extension of beloved memory and forward vision that is so comforting. No kitsch-twinges were recorded, anyway. The barn quilt movement began in Adams County, Ohio in 2005, a project created by Donna Sue Groves to honor her mother, a master quilter. Grundy County was the first Iowa county to begin the project, and many other counties have enthusiastically begun barn quilting projects.
All my mother's quilts are worn out, because we used them hard and carelessly, as my family was wont to do. Today quilts are tended carefully for their labor-infused value. I am moved by them because they have lost function and joined the world of "craft/art product". Murky gains. The meticulous stitchery, fabrics saved for thrifty reuse, such an infusion of symbol, comfort, and memory.
quilt on sale at The Happy Barn
Mexico, in theory, seems remote to Iowa, but not so; in a Mexican restaurant friends give Spanish greetings and they are returned by our server. Iowa's big cities fight drugs and gangs, and Mexicans and Mexican-Americans work in factories and food processing plants, actively recruited in the Southwest. And not surprisingly,they like it too - small town rural life in Iowa is safe, affordable, beautiful, slow-paced; discovered similarities to their own left-behind heartlands.
A family acquaintance teaching in Des Moines counted 37 languages at her elementary school. At first, I was surprised to find an exhibit of Mexican crafts (and Haitian sculpture) at the Waterloo Art Museum. Really shouldn't have been. Then I thought about the daily reality of living in Southern California. Our experience of the border is fraught with danger, conflict, ambiguity, and benefit, as labor flows through the permeable membrane of its nature.
contemporary Mexican weaving
WHAT'S FOR LUNCH?
at The Happy Barn, quiche with tomato and spinach, slaw, and cream soda.
WHAT'S FOR DINNER? SURPRISE!
Gasp and puzzle - dinner at Galleria de Paco with it's SoCal graffiti-style
sign and tag - what is this doing in Waterloo? It's spray can art (Mexican), produced by a refugee (Serb), of the Sistine Chapel (Italian), in Blackhawk
County (Native American), Iowa.
We laughed a bit over Adam's languid pose - the yearning trust in Adam's eyes, and the body waiting to live in God's likeness I remembered so vividly from the Sistine Chapel had become flaccid, somehow empty of promise. I think I know though, that this work was made with great sincerity as a celebration of possibility in America, and I am easy, marveling at the experience what's waiting 'round the bend any given day.
WHAT'S FOR DINNER? POT-LUCK!
Dessert table
This is what you hope to find - only in community relation can one find a dinner experience like a church supper, American Legion bar-be-que, or family party. My brother's retirement party was a warm, happy evening, meeting Lanny and Jane's (my sister-in-law) friends made over 30 years in Cedar Falls. Lots of
salads, roast meats, two Mexican casseroles, and rich, 50's desserts - brownies, pinepple-upside down cake, pound cake, chocolate chip cookies, and most fun, a rhubarb crisp, made with fresh rhubarb from Jane's garden.
red rhubarb - better color for desserts than the green
Even Martha Stewart had articles this month featuring rhubarb, and Jane, always the kitchen enthusiast, tossed one up in her Mexican-style kitchen. My bright idea was to make creme fraiche, so out came Julia's tome, and it was so special on the crisp, the sweet, tart, and crunch (chopped pecans) flavors playing together. We added blueberries, too, for color.
My dear sister-in-law, Jane. We were all so happy to see Lanny and Jane marry, and I've had a most fortunate benefit - I got the sister I never had! How fun! Since Jane already has 5 other sisters, it was very generous of her to add me.
She is an accomplished crafter, cook, gardener, nurse, and her strength buoys all who know her. And she laughs a lot, humor at the ready.
Lanny's retirement is official, so I am back to California - back to crisp balmy June sunshine, our little house, my rose garden, grandchildren, the Hublet John. How really good it was to see my family. I will go more often, I resolve. Not so different now, Iowa and California - globalization has penetrated deep through the Middle Border, drilling entrances and eroding its breadth. More will be different next time, that's a certainty.
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