Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
I have a friend visiting this week, which is exciting. I previously told the county economic development director that my contribution to the county is bringing my friends to town to spend money, and so far my plan is working.
My friend came to see the county fair. I don’t know how much we’ll do outside — even the livestock show rules have been changed due to the dire heat. At midnight last night, the feels-like temperature was 93 degrees, which makes me think dark thoughts about climate change.
But let’s set aside how we’re all going to burn up someday, because I’m not in the mood.
Today, I’m feeling how the language of a place draws invisible lines between who’s in our group and who’s an outsider.
As my friend and I talk, and as family members tell stories to her, I hear words and concepts that I feel like I have to explain — things that make sense here, but that aren’t experienced by my city friends. They’re words that I forgot when I moved away so that I could make brain space for things like pivot tables and sancerre and unagi nigiri.1
I’ve had to pick up a multitude of words again after moving back, forgetting the Japanese names for fish (which I will never order here, even if I could) so that I can remember what goes into farming and food. Things like planter plates and seed drills. Goosenecks. Come-alongs and tie-downs. Bale forks. Pole barns, farrowing houses, Quonset huts, and Morton buildings. Feed lots. Hedge apples and Osage oranges (that’s a trick; they’re the same thing). Crop adjusters. Service bodies. Road diesel and farm diesel. Gators and side by sides. Harrows and harley rakes. TerraGators and hydroseeders. 40s and 80s and sections.2 I don’t use most of these things myself, but I have to know of them to follow conversations or make sense of my memories.
Outside Iowa, “New American” cuisine and the Food Network have caused mass extinctions in the salad family. The branch that includes Whole Foods salad bars and sweetgreen locations has evolved rapidly, but the mayonnaise branch has died, leaving a few vestigial remnants (egg salad, chicken salad, tuna salad, potato salad — all with less mayonnaise than before, or none at all).
In my county, the salad bars are frozen in time. They still have tapioca pudding, thousand island dressing (my secret fave), jarred bacon bits, and bowls of iceberg lettuce balanced on top of a bed of ice. The mayonnaise salad genus thrives — all the usual suspects, plus ham salad, bologna salad, and roast beef salad. That genus was cloned with Miracle Whip for people who prefer their meat with a little tangy zip. The jello salad genus is going strong (although the “lime jello and lima beans” salad from 1960s school lunches has thankfully died off). My mom regularly makes five cup salad, which bridges the gap between the sweet and savory salads — a cup each of sour cream, canned pineapple, canned mandarin oranges, mini marshmallows, and coconut flakes, eaten as a side with the meal rather than as dessert.
As I talk about these things to other Iowans, my accent softens a little. The pervasiveness of media has flattened out American accents and speech patterns; it’s harder to tell where someone is from by voice alone. But my county occupies a linguistic boundary between the anodyne newscaster accent of the Midwest and the obvious bless-your-heart drawl of the South. Some people speak standard American English. Some people speak an almost-Southern, almost-Appalachian cadence with a modified / “ungrammatical” syntax. Some people code switch between the two depending on who they’re trying to influence or impress.
My paternal granddad spoke standard English. My paternal grandma spoke with the local hybrid Midwest/Southern grammar. My dad code switches, and I doubt he even realizes it. I took some linguistics classes in college, which helped me understand that my grandmother’s ungrammatical idioms and patterns (which I’m ashamed to say I judged her for) had a regular syntax, like a micro dialect.
I never code switch — my inner pedantic grammarian flinches when people say something like that dog don’t hunt (meaning an idea won’t work). But some phrases stick in my vocabulary.
People up and go here, and the tense is modified based on the meaning. I up and went to college; I up and came back.
People are fixin’ to do things. I’m fixin’ to send this newsletter — an intent that leaves space for procrastination, which I’m always good at.
Or maybe I should say I’m loafing, which is what the old farmers at my granddad’s seed store would do while they sat around and ate his free popcorn. But loafers are always men. It’s an inexplicably gendered term, which encompasses a feeling of men gossiping in the guise of conducting business, watching other people come and go, and escaping from the endless farm chores for a little bit.
These phrases and words are slowly slipping into my speech patterns. It makes sense; it has been almost a year since I moved back to Iowa. I’ve dropped all my ending g’s and slowed my speech slightly. And last night, when my friend went to bed, I actually said holler if you need anything, like a real southern Iowan.
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Language tries to get at the messy, imprecise task of explaining our outer and inner worlds; our in-groups and out-groups. We do our best, but not everything can be conveyed.
Sometimes the words fail because the worlds are too far apart. “Cappuccino” is an example. Growing up, “cappuccino” was something that came out of a machine as a powder mixed with hot water, full of chocolate and high fructose corn syrup, and I loved it. When I went to Stanford and ordered a cappuccino for the first time, I thought they’d made it wrong but didn’t know how to tell them to fix it. I threw it away as soon as I walked out the door.
Sometimes the words fail because they can’t capture all the nuance of meaning and memory. Even our own names, sometimes, fail us. I carry nicknames from friend groups and workplaces; my legal last name is ripe for nicknames, which is why it’s not my writing last name. I feel a little twinge of heartache when I’m in new places, and new groups, where I’m exclusively called “Sara” until we get close enough for nicknames — even though my LinkedIn profile and all my corporate training would encourage you to stay professional and call me Sara.
And then sometimes the words fail because there is no one left to say them.
My original name, in some specific moments, was Sara Jane. There are only a handful of people left who call me that. As family members die, that name is slowly leaving me.
A day is coming when no one in the world will call me Sara Jane. I don’t exactly want more people to call me that — it’s a name that belongs here, and it doesn’t fit me anywhere else.
What I really want is the childhood feeling of my granddad calling me Sara Jane as I hug him and run my hand over his WWII-era flattop. That’s a feeling of grief so bone-deep, even after twenty-two years, that I can’t name it. That’s a group I up and left before he died, and I can’t get back into no matter how much I deepen my drawl.
Tonight, though, my friend and are fixin’ to go to the next county over and have some bourbon and lemonade. That’s something that goes down easy. That’s something that doesn’t have to be explained.
Cheers,
Sara
This goes both ways; there are words and concepts from my city life that I have to stop and explain here, or gloss over entirely.
I won’t explain the whole list of words, but 40s aren’t 40oz bottles of malt liquor like they were in college. They’re 40 acres of land, which is typically the smallest parcel sold in modern farming unless the land has some anomaly. A whole section is 640 acres.
❤️
I can still hear myself code-switch between three languages. My everyday self, the Spanish-inflected Pueblo cadence, and the much older but deeply, pervasive East Texas cadence of my mom’s generation. It’s completely automatic.