Avoiding rage, embracing glimmers
New feature: “Did + Saw + Heard” for the week of March 11, 2024
I read Paul Krugman’s New York Times piece called “The Mystery of White Rural Rage” (link) at the end of February, and I literally thought, ugh this asshole again. And then I felt some white rural rage of my own.
I’m writing some future Substack posts about the messy, complicated nature of rage — both the idea of rage in rural America, and my specific rage about how it’s characterized by people like Krugman. But it all feels so…heavy. I feel like I’m narrowing my gaze too much to a single frame: the frame of what has been lost in rural Iowa and in America as a whole, and what it feels like to live in the midst of so much blight and decay.
That wasn’t my intention for this newsletter. There is so much left in these rural spaces that is wonderful, hilarious, strange, and worth feeling.
So this week, I’m introducing what may become a weekly feature in addition to my longer essays: “Did + Saw + Heard.”
In December 2019, a friend and I attended a writing workshop taught by Dani Shapiro, the acclaimed memoirist. Most of what I learned there was lost to the memory eraser that was the early pandemic, but one writing exercise stuck with me.
Every day, Shapiro divides a piece of paper into quadrants. She writes down brief snippets of seven things she did, seven things she saw, and one thing she heard. In the fourth quadrant, she draws something that stuck with her.
Because my “drawings” are limited to varying groups of stick figures and triangle trees, I swap out my fourth quadrant for “memory.” I usually write a small fragment of something I remember, triggered by whatever I saw or felt that day.
I find this exercise quite valuable for writers and journalers. The fragments only take a few minutes to jot down. But rereading them, even years later, reopens memories that would otherwise have been lost. It also, more importantly, encourages day-to-day observation of tiny moments — which is helpful in a world where it’s too easy to be distracted and disengaged.
For the next few weeks, I’m going to test interspersing “did + saw + heard” posts with my longer essays about rural life. It might be interesting (and way more fun) to share the experience of living here through glimmers and fragments, without trying to turn a quick observation or passing quip into an essay of grave importance.
Caveats: I’m not going to write seven things in each category. I may add or remove categories on a whim — in fact, I already have. Everything I write here happened (as I remember it), although I may condense for clarity. Let’s just have fun with it and see where it goes, shall we?
DID
- Made a variant of this excellent (and easy!) tofu stir-fry to balance out the tater tot casserole I made last week. Because I avoid gluten, my tater tot casserole is a relatively bougie variant — I use fresh vegetables and milk instead of canned cream of mushroom soup. Lucky for me, my mom is also gluten-free, so my family tends to appreciate my gluten-free cooking. They judge the tofu pretty hard, though, so I eat tofu alone like it’s some sort of secret shame.
- Became a Kate Middleton truther. Yes, petty gossip should be beneath me. No, I can’t help myself.
Small communities generate a level of awareness of other people’s business that is sometimes heartwarming, sometimes frightening. I naturally go deep on teasing apart facts and rumors in my hometown, and so I naturally apply the same level of scrutiny to public figures. Not my finest trait, but probably not my worst.
Or, to use a Bane/Batman meme:
That said… I do feel complicated about encouraging further scrutiny of a woman who is already one of the most scrutinized people in the world. I also suspect that, whatever is going on, 2+ decades of demanded perfection by the media-consuming public has contributed to it. This woman got a blow-out and put on heels within hours of giving birth (three times!), so whatever is happening now, she could surely use a break from the media.
With the royals (as with reality TV stars and politicians), the question always lurks: where is the line between the right to privacy vs. the choices they’ve historically made to seek favorable publicity and quash criticism?
On top of that, the British royal family is one of the most bizarre familial prisons in modern times, with challenging father/son relationships and generational drama between siblings stretching back hundreds of years. And all of them seem to make their own tradeoffs between personal happiness, public duty, and feeding the publicity machine that keeps them in their palaces. They’re a tragic mirror for so many toxic family dynamics. It’s something I can’t look away from, even when I feel like I should listen to my better angels and leave them alone.
All that said — if you want to chat Kate Middleton theories, please slide into my DMs.
note: DMs are a new Substack feature, so if this button doesn’t work, I was too dumb to figure it out. I also accept comments, emails, Instagram DMs (@sarawrites), and handwritten letters about Waterkate, as Twitter is calling it.
SAW
- Caitlin Clark leading the Iowa Hawkeyes to victory in the Big 10 tournament. Women’s basketball games are posting huge stats this year, and this game was watched by nearly as many people as watched the men’s Duke/UNC rivalry game the day before. I have never cheered for Iowa in my life (I’m ride-or-die for Iowa State), but I’ll cheer for what Caitlin Clark and her teammates have done for the women’s game.
- The local garbage company owner — a man in his early seventies — leaning over a dumpster to pick up a few bags of trash rather than bothering to use his garbage truck’s loader. Residential trash goes on a set schedule every week, but business dumpsters seem to get emptied whenever he drives by one and decides it’s time. I live in fear of the day when he retires and we don’t have garbage collection anymore, so who wants to go in with me on buying a garbage company?
HEARD
- “It would be nice if it weren’t for the darned wind” - a phrase so common that you can buy t-shirts about it. It’s been uncharacteristically warm for March after the warmest February on record, but the wind remains a constant.
- Sirens, many times. The darned wind is bad for grass fires, especially when farmers are attempting controlled burns of their fields before planting. Farmers also sometimes burn their trash since there isn’t consistent garbage collection outside of town. One fire got out of control recently and burned down an abandoned farmhouse. Everyone should know better than to burn on a windy day, but then, it’s almost always windy.
All the firefighters around here are volunteers. There isn’t a permanently staffed fire department. When a grass fire happens, guys are radioed to drop their day jobs and grab equipment from the fire station. Pickups and fire trucks speed out of town, sirens blaring, based on who is available. And if the fire is in the dead of night, they still respond — and yawn through their day jobs in the morning.
READ
- Kelton Wright’s post at Shangrilogs about stacking grocery runs and medical appointments when you live in the middle of nowhere resonated with me — although her middle-of-nowhere is more “snow-capped mountain” than “windswept plain.”
MEMORY IN MEMORIAM
- Pour one out for the latest succulent that I murdered. I tend to overwater them, which is hilarious because I tend to dehydrate myself. Maybe every time I think about watering succulents, I should take a sip of water instead?
Let me know what you think of this new format! I hope I can spread some cheer from rural Iowa, despite all the grimness of election cycles and pandemic four-year-anniversary retrospectives.
Cheers,
Sara
p.s. If you missed my last post — in which I discussed Flaco the Owl and also why my latest book project is probably dead — you can catch up here:
Or you can read an earlier post about how I use obituaries to track down errant bits of facts and fiction:
p.p.s. If you haven’t subscribed yet, here’s your opportunity!
🙏 I might not have plains, but I do feel you on the windswept.
I grew up in the sticks. I lived near a little hamlet, and some changes are upsetting. It was difficult to read about the changes. A natural response would be to assign blame to someone or some group. The piece didn't mention it, but the changes started almost a century ago. They started in the sparsely populated hills where I lived near this little hamlet. Most of the changes were well underway by the time I arrived.
There are a few constants in rural America. You're a long way from your doctor, your durable supplies, and some, if not most, of your food. Of the few folks living in the sticks, most are tied to the land/environment, typically through their livelihood.
Big changes were driven by the operations working to reap the bounty of the land. Those operations grew in size and labor efficiency. In other cases, the fish, the timber, the water, or some other key resource has been strained.
These last factors have had one dramatic impact, a reduction in rural populations. When the wider ranges around a town depopulate, the need for services in the town shrinks. Distances between services grow, more people leave, and so on.
If there's one thing people can feel, it's a death spiral.
This doesn't explain precisely what happened near my old stomping grounds, but the folks living there shared the same pain.
Robert Reich may not have nailed the causes of suffering in rural America, but this piece and you folks got me to think about it.