First of all, a small confession to readers who might have thought otherwise. I don’t live in Iowa anymore. Haven’t for decades, actually. But it’s not because I set out to put Iowa behind me, for I didn’t. My egress was just simply life happening, which took me to Washington state a long time ago. And that’s where I got anchored. But Iowa still lives in my psyche and I’ve probably made over a hundred trips back since leaving.

Why, you might ask? Well, most members of my extended family still live there, for one thing. So do my oldest friends. But Iowa is also where I’m grounded. Maybe it’s a little bit like the biological imprinting of salmon that everyone out here in the Northwest knows about. Nature has programmed the fish to return to the stream where they were reared. [We’ll just forget all that other nonsense that doesn’t fit, the spawning and dying part.] It must have helped my programming that I have pleasant memories of my parents, my friends, my childhood on the farm, and the way things were in that simpler time. Then again, maybe those times only seemed simpler because I was a child locked within a smaller, more understandable child’s world. But enough of that too.

What I’m getting around to is that for me Iowa is also somewhat of a fictional place I’ve built in my mind—a state of mind, if you will excuse the cliche. In this place things function and work like nowhere else, people are mostly reasonable, and problems sometimes actually get solved. I know exactly where this idea comes from because I can still pull together a kind of an ideal for a piece of humorous fiction I once contemplated writing. It was to be a rural and eminently practical place where farmers ruled and made it function with nearly the same reliability and precision as exerted by the force of gravity. Yes, farmers!

See, I worked a lot with my dad and that meant knowing and being around lots of farmers. Farmers worked with their hands, understood practical economics and management, and brooked little bureaucratic nonsense. They were a mixed lot of characters but for the most part consisted of no nonsense practical men who could erect a fence that would keep in a bull, weld things that broke, and cuss when they couldn’t weld things that broke. They could birth stuck calves in the middle of the night, squirt milk from a teat into the mouth of a kitten one minute and blast marauding raccoons in the chicken coop the next. They could dehorn calves or casually castrate pigs (which might give many an onlooker the willies in this age of sensitivity). I watched farmers sweat through ungodly heat or disaster and then still be able to joke about the corrupt politicians in Illinois or hillbillies in Missouri (yes, those Iowans always thought their own state a tad superior). And perhaps most admirable of all, a few of them even knew not to ever strive for perfection out on the farm because there, almost always, good enough would do.

Okay, I realize there’s some butterfly powder (to use the self-delusion metaphor from my novel) in all this, even when applied to “the good old days.” I know that through the decades Iowa has changed along with the rest of the nation. While many of its people still prefer to wear jeans, as I did on the farm and still do today, fewer of those people in jeans are farmers now. And those farmers don’t sweat as much anymore given the modern convenience of air conditioned cabs on their tractors and crop insurance policies in their file cabinets. I know eBay, Craigslist, social networking, and a safe water supply have also come to the state. Neither has it escaped my attention that the same problems of crime, drugs, sex offenders, budget shortfalls, self-serving lawyers, and ambitious politicians with an eye out for their next office are a fixed part of the landscape now. But I also appreciate that the state is still progressive and the people, for the most part, are genuine. At least for me, that’s good enough to sustain a state of mind!