Maybe, in dawn's early light, Hawarden, down there beneath the water tower against a background summer sky that's totally peach, waiting for the dawn.
Tasseling corn, unrelenting fields of it, mile after mile after mile, sometimes cutting geometric patterns up and over unending hills.
What seems a family cemetery, all alone, against a hill, the graves only slightly kept in grass that's largely unmowed. Still, after all the years, old moss-besotted stones standing unbowed, straight as a row of recruits.
The mortal coil of a woman named Jerusha Edwards, born 1818, six years after the second war of liberation. She died right here, on what must have been frontier, August 23, 1879, one of the neighborhood's earliest settlers. Someone kindly poured cement beneath the stone long ago already, so it still stands. An open hand points heavenward above a single phrase "In God we trust." Does anyone know her story? I'd love to hear.
So why did George and Elizabeth, so long ago, not share a name? Both lived into their eighties, and they considered themselves man and wife. Common law? No matter. "Blessed are the pure in heart."
So what can you find on a random trek around the valley of the Big Sioux. In addition to a whole world, as always, some blessed beauty in the weeds.
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