Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former current tech worker. I recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa after two decades in San Francisco. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. Thank you for joining me!
All around town, the catalpas are blooming.
A neighbor once told me that she remembered a catalpa salesman coming through sixty years ago. That explains the profusion of similarly-sized catalpa trees in town. They’re beautiful in summer: giant heart-shaped leaves and clusters of white blossoms that drift down to carpet the grass. But their beauty comes at a cost. In late autumn the leaves disappear, leaving hundreds of foot-long seed pods dangling from wizened branches.
Despite the mess, I love these trees. I have one in my front yard, shading my living room; and one in the back, marking the boundary between me and my western neighbor. They both look big enough to be sixty years old, but I don’t know trees as well as I know words.
The botany pages I’ve consulted indicate that the average lifespan of a catalpa is sixty years. Judging from the trees I see on my walks through town, I don’t know if anyone here has intentionally planted a catalpa since that salesman’s successful pitch decades ago. I wonder if the town’s catalpas will all die at the same time — another thing I love on the brink of disappearing.
I haven’t posted in almost two months. On the hamster wheel of modern-day content creation, this is a mortal sin; I’m sure Substack corporate would send the executioners if they could. If you were worried about me, I’m sorry (and thank you to those who reached out!).
The short version of why I haven’t written is simple. I got a job — a full-time thing with the usual pragmatic upsides, like health insurance and money. It sucked up all my attention the last two months, but I’m emerging from the onboarding period mostly unscathed.
I think I’m happy about the job? At least, I’m as happy as I can be when I secretly chafe at having a boss and structure and to-do lists, even though those things are often good for me (and necessary for my bank account).
The company is based in San Francisco, but I can work from Iowa. My coworkers are genuinely lovely and uniformly competent, which is almost shocking. I get consistent doses of validation, which I don’t get with novel-writing (where reviews come years later, if at all), or as the prodigal daughter who votes exactly the opposite of her bewildered parents. And the job certainly pays better than publishing a free Substack and (not) finishing my novel.
Still, it’s been strange to flip the switch from “self-employed writer” to “chief of staff at a tech company.”
Writing that title from my backyard balcony in rural Iowa, with birds chirping and buzzards circling, sounds like total nonsense.
To be fair, “chief of staff at a tech company” probably sounds like total nonsense in most places.
But when I open my work laptop, suddenly it’s the buzzards and catalpas that sound like nonsense.
I’ve always felt this tension. I lived in San Francisco for almost two decades, but I would come back to Iowa four times a year. On both the outbound and the return trips, I went through the same dislocation — the same “first day back” in which I felt wholly alien even though I was intimately familiar with both places.
Living in Iowa while working for a San Francisco-based company has cut those reentry periods from days to seconds.
Take last Tuesday. I sat through an afternoon of Zoom meetings. My brain was buzzing with to-dos when every weather alarm in the house went off. It was yet another tornado warning — we’ve had several this spring — and I watched the sky turn suspicious colors before I briefly fled to the basement.
The tornado didn’t materialize and my house was still standing, so I got back to work. I kept sending Slack messages as I put on my shoes and switched gears from “tech worker” to “library board member.”
I sped over to one of the only restaurants within twenty miles to join the evening meeting of a local charitable club. I slowed my speech cadence and asked some seventy-year-old men, whom I’ve known my whole life, to donate $500 to cover the library’s ebook program for a couple of months.
The cost of my last flight to San Francisco could have covered a summer’s worth of ebooks for my whole town, but that’s not how capitalism works.
I made the faux pas of ordering a margarita — my brain was still in California mode and I forgot that most local volunteer groups are dry during their business meetings. I know many of those guys drink because I used to sell them beer when I worked at the gas station as a teenager. But it didn’t make my margarita any easier to swallow.
I came home and should have done some more work. But I suddenly had trouble caring about the tasks I’d agreed to a few hours earlier. After all, no venture capital-fueled riches will trickle down to keep my town’s library open.
Most of my days are equally mixed up.
Maybe if I had been a mother, I would have gotten practice in these sudden shifts — the dance between caretaking and career, the frenetic switching between everyone else’s demands.
But.
Maybe I am not a mother because a child would, inevitably, ground me. By kindergarten, I would need to choose whether to raise a San Franciscan or an Iowan — and then I would have to make peace with that choice, in a way I have never made peace within myself.
It’s no wonder people burn bridges, cut ties, ghost. Life is simpler when you’re not trying to live so many lives at the same time.
And writing is simpler when you can immerse yourself in the story, keeping it whole and unencumbered in your mind, rather than spending big chunks of your day pursuing a different path entirely.
I have never cared for simple, though. I don’t think I’ll start prioritizing it now.
An unplanned new catalpa has taken root in the middle of my backyard. It came up volunteer, as we say here, crowding next to an old flagpole where the lawnmower couldn’t cut off its first growth. By the end of last summer, the new catalpa was six feet tall. I decided to keep the catalpa and remove the flagpole instead.
I’ve admired it from my balcony as I’ve written this. The tree is too young to produce flowers, but it’s grown several feet this spring. In a few years, if it makes it, it will shade my gazebo. Maybe someday it will be the last catalpa in town, but I hope the rest of them outlive the botanists’ predictions.
I don’t know what will sprout up in this newsletter now that I’m splitting my time between writing and a day job. I don’t know how my writing will shift. It feels hard, right now, to sense the story and give shape to the novel that it will become.
But maybe there’s some lesson to be found by occupying this strange, small sliver of space between Iowa and San Francisco. It feels lonely here sometimes, which probably means it’s my story alone to tell.
In the meantime, I’ll get back to my regular posting schedule. You’ve missed all sorts of small town things: city council shenanigans, tulip festivals, planting season, and the occasional act of nepotism. I can’t wait to catch you up.
Cheers,
Sara
p.s. if you missed my last post, check it out below:
Covid and crab people
p.p.s. if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do!
It was only a matter of time. You're living your best life <3
I was wondering where you went! I'm so glad your letter popped up. It's awesome you can work from there. I just told my sister last night that the Catalpa in her yard is maybe a vanilla bean tree, but now I know! Maybe they had the same salesperson.
ALSO: I could not love this passage more:
"Writing that title from my backyard balcony in rural Iowa, with birds chirping and buzzards circling, sounds like total nonsense.
To be fair, “chief of staff at a tech company” probably sounds like total nonsense in most places.
But when I open my work laptop, suddenly it’s the buzzards and catalpas that sound like nonsense."