DMV

Yesterday we attempted to go to the DMV and get Iowa state licenses. Instead we ended up driving along a rural-industrial highway, racing alongside a screaming freight train, only to end up at a state park halfway between Iowa City and the Amana colonies. The park was actually a nature conservation park, so there was a whole lot of prairie going on. Nice stands of pine and hardwoods as well.

At the crest of a hill, we parked and just looked up and out at the endless blue sky, which is bluer here than it is in Georgia. (I don’t know why. Someone tells me it’s because of positive ions, whatever those are.) But it’s a blue comprised of countless of blues that gently shade into one another in these sweeping, soft transitions you can only detect if you cast your gaze slightly downward and peer at the sky peripherally. Then your rods and cones will jangle together in the perfect rhythm that lets you see teals and aquamarines, jades and indigos, dirty blues and pristine blues. And you’ll sigh. And the corn will hear you.

Yesterday it occurred to me how cool it would be to be Amish, to be surrounded by untouched wilderness all day, far from cell phones and – even more sublimely – people on their cell phones. Just you and the windmills, baby. And at night, you could hear the crops sleeping in the moonlight. And you wouldn’t wonder stuff like “I wonder if the crops can dream,” because you’d know they do, deep in your bones. And sleep would overtake you like a beneficent Samurai.