What is the #Midwessay? What is the Midwest? What are the characteristics, if any, of the #Midwessay (the Midwest essay)? What gathers us together? What pulls us apart? Springing from a twitter conversation, we started asking writers and readers what they imagine (or would like to reimagine) as the Midwest and the Midwessay. The #Midwessay is a series of reports from the Midwest (whatever that is) by and/or about Midwestern essay and essayists (whatever those are). Essay Daily will be publishing these, sorted (loosely) by state, in February 2021 and beyond. These #Midwessays will be collected here and on a separate site at a later date. If you'd like to submit a report / essay, send it our way. Details and coordinators for each state are listed here. You can also ping Ander (link at the upper right) if we don't list a coordinator yet for your state. —The Editors
In the Land of Ope and Plenty
Suzanne Guess
*
If you live in the Midwest, you might have heard the jokes. Why is it so windy in Iowa? Because Minnesota blows and Missouri sucks. Where do you go when the black hole doesn’t suck enough? Nebraska. The Midwest: flyover country to many, home to about sixty-seven million, where when we wake up and the outside temperature is -4 degrees Fahrenheit, we’re glad that the wind isn’t blowing so we can get out and scoop the snow off the porch. We know it won’t be too many months before the sun becomes a ball of fire and the temperature and heat index combine to the 110s Fahrenheit.
If you’re from Iowa, and I am, you notice that people from outside the Midwest think Iowa is one big farm and that we all live on it. Except it isn’t and we don’t. I visited a farm for about two hours once when I was eighteen. I petted a cow. And for those wondering, we don’t grow potatoes here. That’s Idaho. In the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind, Gerald O’Hara (Thomas Mitchell) scolds Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) about her lack of reverence for Tara:
Why, land is the only think in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for because it’s the only thing that lasts. And to anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them, the land is like their mother.
Iowans work this land, fight over it, and in some cases murder for it. It’s thick, black, rich dirt, and farm land goes for about $7500 an acre here. You can grow just about anything on it. You have to try not to grow on it. An average 359-acre Iowa farm can feed about 155 people per year, and there are approximately 85,000 operating farms in this state; you do the math. Iowa soil also makes the best mud pies in the summer when you’re eight years old, and juicy, sloppy mud puddles to jump in after a soaking rain.
Not growing up on a farm does not mean I am any less attached to the land where I live. My own home sits on just short of an acre that has been in my family and helped sustain it for ninety years. I’m the fourth generation to live in this house, and my family has been in Iowa for six (the first two generations were farmers, about seventy miles west of here). When I am in my back yard, I can visualize the cow in a small barn tended by my great-grandfather, my great-grandmother’s chickens, and the large garden; later, the same garden my grandmother managed and on which the family depended during the Depression, the Victory Garden during WWII. Later still, her rose and lilac bushes that continue to bloom into the 21st century. Although I get offers, no one will be able to buy this land until my executor pries the last clump of dirt from my dead hand. I am not alone in this. Last year, 20,299 Iowa farms were classified as Century Farms, indicating that they have been in the same family for at least one hundred years. And 1464 are considered Heritage Farms, meaning that they’ve been in the same family for a minimum of one hundred and fifty years, which is a feat given that Iowa became a state one hundred and seventy-five years ago.
Because agriculture is the major industry in Iowa, there’s much interest in the weather of all five seasons: spring, summer, road construction, fall, winter. Summer brings tornados, and while others might head for the basement or an interior room when the sky turns yellow and the air becomes eerily still, Iowans are a little different. Like most Midwesterners, we go out on the front or back porch, depending, to have a look around. When it sounds like a freight train is barreling through the yard, it’s time to seek shelter. The derecho that ravaged Iowa last August took us all by surprise, though. I watched through my front window as it took out a large section of one of my hundred-year-old oak trees and planted it firmly on my garage. When it was all over, I stood in my front yard not knowing what to do. My neighbor came over with a chainsaw despite the tree that lay across his own yard. A little while later, his wife came over to lend a hand. That’s what we do here in Iowa, we help our neighbors even if our own situation is just as bad.
As I write this, I look out my office window waiting for a snow storm to dump a foot of snow on central Iowa. As kids, these heavy snowfalls were the highlight of our winter: we built snow forts, tunneled through drifts, and made an arsenal of snowballs to launch at the kids from the next street over who tried to encroach on our territory. Many of us spent our childhood and teen-age years skating around a pond, playing crack the whip, climbing up the icy wooden steps to a warming hut, buying hot chocolate for twenty-five cents, taking off our skates, wiggling our toes through three pairs of socks, and maybe getting our first kiss. There is joy in every season for us here, in spite of the extremes and unpredictability.
As writers, we’re taught to write what we know. What I know about Iowa often shows up in my writing: the beauty and brutality of the seasons, the deep roots of family and land, and how “Iowa Nice” defines us—most of the time. But if there’s one thing I know about Iowa and the Midwest, it’s that if you claim you’re from here (and why wouldn’t you?) and don’t say “Ope” when you bump into something or someone or spill your beer, you’re a fraud. And we all know it.
Suzanne Guess is a 6th generation Iowan and doesn't have plans to leave the state any time soon. She is the founder of the Raccoon River Reading Series, Associate Nonfiction Editor of the Mud Season Review, and Nonfiction Editor of the Good Life Review Literary Magazine. When she's not writing or reading submissions, she plays flute in a wind ensemble and throws a ball for her dog Sadie.
What is the #Midwessay? What is the Midwest? What are the characteristics, if any, of the #Midwessay (the Midwest essay)? What gathers us together? What pulls us apart?
Springing from a twitter conversation, we started asking writers and readers what they imagine (or would like to reimagine) as the Midwest and the Midwessay. The #Midwessay is a series of reports from the Midwest (whatever that is) by and/or about Midwestern essay and essayists (whatever those are). Essay Daily will be publishing these, sorted (loosely) by state, in February 2021 and beyond. These #Midwessays will be collected here and on a separate site at a later date. If you'd like to submit a report / essay, send it our way. Details and coordinators for each state are listed here. You can also ping Ander (link at the upper right) if we don't list a coordinator yet for your state. —The Editors
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