The night is fractured and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance. – Pablo Neruda
Oh, hello. You must be new here. First off, Iowa is weather and corn. These moments are all we know, farmers harvesting on this November night because there’s far more corn than daylight, the bright lights of the tractors high and blinding, the massive machines growling through field after field, calling up dust.
Sunday. Theology becomes a cheap God-rhetoric we fling about at the slightest discomfort, the first hint of challenge or opposition. Questions impale us on the cross of doubt. Prayer is the thing we do to escape the demons of reality, rather than face the truth of our own humanity. Sunday lunch, up!
Monday. Most of us exist somewhere between trauma and faith, on a sliding scale, an unmapped wilderness. This is pain with a stopwatch and distance with a sign. Trauma changes us forever; we can never go back. We reinvent ourselves in order to live. Between the old-fashioned forms along these old-timey lanes, science creeps in and slays the ancient beliefs held generations-long, the tight-lipped secrets from across the seas. Ancestry gave me a father I didn’t know, undid the one I knew. Siblings too, wholes made halves, but all the halves added together will never be a whole. (It’s only math, after all.) “We didn’t talk about that stuff back then,” will never fly again. If we think we’re beyond life’s surprises, don’t turn the calendar page.
Tuesday. Herein lies the familiarity of old friends in a world of so much new. When someone breaks, we don’t try to fix them as they’re falling because it can’t be done. Rather, we help pick up the pieces, and like a patient puzzler, find the perfect place for each. So we venture down these ankle-busting hills like we would a snowy one on skis, by turning our feet at a slight angle, never straight-on if we want to walk out soundly. A mile on rough ground, it is said, is twice that on smooth. And it’s always wise to frost a few panes in a glass house.
Wednesday. Land of endless corn and pumpkin pies, and a solid history of the good life, yet Iowa’s water is not only suspect but judged guilty. Farm runoff, river dumping, and nitrate levels are out of control. Coliform bacteria is endemic. To clean up the mess we’d have to spend billions, and that’s a lot of corn, er, coin.
Thursday. At 5’11” to his 6’6”, my partner calls me his little woman. An incident of nature, that strange genetic code that walks upright. Sometimes chromosomes zigzag wrong—he, she—what are you, they ask, I ask, you have that thing but who are you really, and who really knows. I find it matters less in the long run than, perhaps, climate change or North Korean forebodings. Boko Haram. Only sometimes the wires get crossed and we find ourselves cut off at the head, objects of unexpected aggressions, bleeding on the sidewalk along the path of an uncertain whirlwind.
Friday. There’s never enough time just to sit and think. Everything calls you, top to bottom: sky, air, ground, beasts of the field. One giant whoopee. Plans are imperative: 1) to get away, 2) to stay away for more than a few moments at a time, and 3) to not cultivate the bad thought while you’re gone. Things will wait, is what you tell yourself. No sheep-serial-killer will stealth his way to your plat, no fox-on-chickens. The roofs are new, derecho-proof (let’s hope), tornado-proof, hail-resistant—we have disasters. The waters rise, all this rain.
Saturday. Gusts up to 50 mph outside my window shimmy trees from the crown to the ground. The sky behind is soft and muted. Maybe a placid existence amid gently sunny surroundings is what we look for. And maybe all this stuff that perplexes and changes and brings the world, us, to our knees is what we deal with. How many times can we see a new cross stuck in a highway ditch before we stop cringing? How many times can we look at sixteen-year-old photographs of a wrecked car slammed head-on by a drunk driver, now dead, and remember each impossible sound, crash, and pain? Age and distance somehow bring comfort. In the dusking quiet, I wait for the moon and the hooting owls that always, eventually, appear.
Chila Woychik is originally from the beautiful land of Bavaria. She has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron and Passages North, and has released an essay collection, Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology (Shanti Arts, 2020). She won Storm Cellar’s 2019 Flash Majeure Contest and Emry’s 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award. These days she tends sheep, chickens, and two aging barn cats, and roams the Iowan outback. She also edits the Eastern Iowa Review. www.chilawoychik.com
