It was hot on Friday and hot again
on Saturday. Since Saturday night it has been raining and much cooler. It is still dripping wet this morning. The street sssssts where the tires roll onward.
My friend Eddie berates me for my smugness - the smugness of the Iowa farm boy, he says. Guilty as charged, I guess. Smugness is one of our failings. We feel superior to the California fellows, the New York fellows: we know what we know, it's pretty clear to us what's up and what's down and we don't have much patience for those who can't or won't see that. Our smugness makes us fat and sassy in our resolve. Eddie's right.
Yet how does one step outside or beyond his birthright, this square certainty about the world, especially when facing down those who don't have much respect for the middlewest to start with? Perhaps, the crow would say, you ought to give those fellows on the west coast and the east coast the sort of respect you are looking for. It's difficult when they don't have in them the courtesies we're used to. Should we charm them with our steadfastness?
Ah, hell, the proof is not in the talking and telling stories; the proof in a horse race is whose horse comes in first.
Seems like, though, we're always racing on their track, never on ours, always running their race, not our own. Is our smugness a defensive posture in the face of our sense of helplessness?
Likely these aren't questions a farmer would be asking. Why am I?
There is mist still on the windshield. The steering wheel is sticky with humidity. I drive with my lights on. The wipers flap, flip, flap.
The canning factory is spraying water on the field to the west of Highway E just north of the village. The field smells like a hog house, sharp in the nostrils, like a flame inhaled.
Great sweeping stretches of corn are tasseled out now. The green season rolls like a runaway train.
The mist has thickened. Visibility is reduced to about a mile. Trees are lost in the dangling greyness of the morning. The day is wet. It would be a good day to be tied up in harbor, safe against whatever the day might bring.
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