In case you missed last week’s announcement: I’m interspersing “Did, Saw, Heard” posts with my longer essays about life in rural Iowa. I want to share the experience of living here through glimmers and fragments, without trying to turn every quick observation or passing quip into an essay of grave importance. Let me know what you think!
I spent a lot of time this week thinking about — and avoiding — my analysis of all the pent-up rage in rural America and what it means for our society. The essay that I’m working on is still slow to coalesce. Everything I feel in my hometown is some mix of fragile hope and deep grief, co-mingled until they feel like the same thing.
I don’t know how to make sense of it other than by writing about it. But my protective brain whispers, hey girl, maybe you should stop trying…maybe you should move back to San Francisco and never think about this again.
Leaving is tempting. But I plan to stay as long as there is still a story here to tell.
So while the next longer-form essay continues to percolate, here’s this week’s “Did, Saw, Heard.”
DID
I donated two pounds of hamburger for the concession stand at the annual town play.
This year’s town play was called “Hankerin’ Hillbillies.” I want romcoms to make a comeback, but I’m generally unenthused about hillbillies — so I wasn’t all that interested in watching hillbillies hankerin’ after each other. The director asked me to try out when I ran into him at the post office in January, but I had too many other commitments to make an unpaid acting career feasible.
That said… I think it’s lovely that my town still puts on a play every year. Tickets are free, but there’s a free-will donation at the door. Concessions are served by volunteers. All proceeds go toward the town celebration in September.
A few weeks before the play, I was tagged in a public Facebook post informing me that I needed to donate two pounds of hamburger for the concession stand. There were fiftyish people tagged to bring hamburger, chips, and pop (soda if you’re not a hillbilly) — and for context, 50 people is over 10% of the town’s population. I dropped my hamburger off at the community building as requested. The people running the concession stand said that everything they’d asked for had been fulfilled.
The hamburger donation was easy, though. I’ll know I’ve been fully reintegrated into the town when I get “upgraded” to the pie donation list. But I’m not ready to be judged by a jury of my peers (or my mother’s peers) on the quality of my crust, so I’m trying to lay low.
SAW
A red and black plaid shirt, tucked into a driver’s side door on an old sedan, to keep snow and rain out of a broken window.
The window has been broken for months. I see it whenever I walk along the street where the car is usually parked.
This broken window is a hint at what I’m struggling with — the grief I feel over so much that is broken here, how few resources there are to fix anything, and the way my town’s environment yields a pervasive, almost subconscious sense of loss.
But other people seem to live here without acknowledging this feeling. So maybe it’s a me problem?
HEARD
“I told her I’d bury her horse… as long as she didn’t tell anyone I did it.”
Somehow the topic of horse funerals came up recently. I thought about horse funerals approximately zero times when living in San Francisco, but they’re more frequent in Iowa.
My only adult experience with horses was during a corporate training exercise years ago. A coworker thought that a couple of hours of horse therapy would cure our team’s intractable culture problem. Spoiler: it didn’t. Our team efforts to get the horses to move around the ring were laughably bad. Our lack of trust in each other, and the subsequent lack of trust reflected back at us from the horses, would only have been more obvious if we’d all taken turns kicking each other in the face.
However, I found it personally interesting. There was an individual portion of the exercise where each of us had to lead a horse to the other side of the ring and back. My horse responded immediately, seeming to trust me. But it also kept nudging me and smelling my hair. The therapist said the horse was sensing a lack of boundary. Trustworthy + nice hair + low boundaries pretty much sums me up.
Anyway, back to horse funerals. Horses can live thirty years or more — long enough to be truly beloved. They also weigh a thousand pounds. If you want to bury them, it takes some doing (takes some doing is another thing I hear around here regularly).
According to my dad, it used to be easier to dispose of horses, cows, and other large farm animals. A renderer would pick them up free of charge because they got decent value out of processing the by-products. Now, it’s the opposite — if you can find a rendering service, they’ll often charge a pick-up fee.
And when it comes to a beloved animal like a horse, the idea of paying a renderer to turn your horse into industrial fats probably isn’t what you want to do.
The person who said, “I told her I’d bury her horse… as long as she didn’t tell anyone I did it,” has buried several horses over the decades. But only for friends and close neighbors, and always with the stipulation that they not tell anyone who buried their horse. Horse funerals aren’t something they enjoy doing. They have the equipment to dig the hole and bury the horse, and it’s perfectly legal to do, but it’s not quick or pleasant. They don’t want more people to think of them as a possible provider of this service.
Come to think of it, “trustworthy + nice hair + low boundaries” probably sums that person up too. This is a warning to me: I shouldn’t learn how to run heavy equipment, because otherwise I might be tricked into becoming a horse undertaker myself.
READ
I finished The Overstory by Richard Powers (Amazon).
I’m only five years late to the party; it won a Pulitzer for fiction in 2019. I really loved it, and I recommend it if you’re looking for a slightly depressing / slightly uplifting read about late-stage capitalism and ecological disaster.
I also found it almost too eerily resonant to my own life. It opened on a windswept Iowa farm, and it touched on the Stanford Prison Experiment, Silicon Valley, artificial intelligence, and the mysterious ways that people intertwine and shift each other’s lives.
But the real story is the trees. All the main characters are ultimately footnotes in a much more complicated relationship between trees and their environment. It’s a strange, fascinating book, and I loved it — even if I can’t tell an elm from a sycamore (and, according to the book, probably should be able to).
If you have thoughts or comments, please share them below. See you next week!
Cheers,
Sara
p.s. if you missed last week’s post, you can learn more about where “Did, Saw, Heard” came from:
Or, if you want to read about the community building where the town play is held, you can catch up on the communal Thanksgiving dinner we host there:
p.p.s. if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do - it’s a free and easy way to support my work.
I love this kind of post, too. Also, The Overstory was so intense. I have a thing for trees, and the giants are powerful beings.
Yep, grew up with "pop" , never soda. Thanks for making me smile, but also I feel something sad about a way of life tossed aside, like it has no more shelf life. I suspect many of the people there are happy, with friends, family, the rhythms of the seasons. This is their destiny. Just as you have yours and I have mine. Mine involved leaving. All that matters is being at peace with one's destiny, I think.