Iowa Time
My parents both grew up on farms in North Central Iowa. Most summers when I was a kid, my sisters and I would spend a week at my mother’s parents’ farm. The days were long and leisurely and full of interesting things to do: picking apples from the ancient apple tree in the yard, fishing for bullheads and bluegills in a nearby creek, making elaborate mud pies, searching for corn ears with pink silk so we could transform them into dolls just as our grandmother did when she was a girl.
Absorbed in these activities and many others, I always found myself surprised by the strangely gentle passage of time on the farm.
On Sundays, my grandmother would make pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs before church. I would wake up in the morning to the sun streaming through the east-facing window in a pink-carpeted room upstairs and smell bacon frying. We’d sit around the breakfast bar in our pajamas and take our time, eating slowly and paying no attention to the clock. My grandfather, who could always be relied upon to instigate all manner of silliness, would carve orange peels into citrus earmuffs and place them on our heads as we ate. Eventually, we’d wander back upstairs to change, brush our teeth, and trade the orange peels for headbands and braids. Even if we dallied getting ready, we’d invariably find we still had at least an hour to amuse ourselves with a book or a puzzle. Then, we’d pile into the plush backseat of the Crown Victoria and drive two miles down the blacktop road to the church where three generations of my family had been baptized and buried.
This was a stark contrast to my school routine back home, where I’d habitually wake in a panic, rush to get dressed, and dash out the door with a piece of peanut butter toast clenched between my teeth, only to arrive at school seconds before the starting bell. Time, my sisters and I concluded, worked differently in Iowa. In Iowa, you regularly had so much time on your hands you could do everything you wanted, with enough of a surplus to be bored.
This phenomenon became known in our family as “Iowa Time.”
For years I thought of Iowa Time as an experience tethered to a specific geography. The temporal spaciousness that suffused those weeks at my grandparents’ farm was not present anywhere else in my life. As I grew older and spent less and less time at the farm, the magic of Iowa Time began to fade into memory. This summer, though, I made an important discovery and it all came rushing back.
In late May, I looked ahead at my family’s calendar for June, July, and August. The weeks were peppered with events: kids’ activities, holiday and birthday celebrations, vacations, work obligations, and then preparing for school to start again. Each week was brimming with plans. Instead of excitement, I felt dread washing over me. It was simply too much. Too much to do, laden with the extra burden of the obligation to relax. Summer is supposed to feel leisurely, I told myself. And here I was, doing it wrong, teeth still clenched (albeit sans toast).
The realization felt especially bitter this summer. Earlier this year, at age 40, I’d gotten my first tattoo: a petite branch of cherry blossoms above my ankle. The inspiration for my choice was a poem plucked from my volume of Japanese Death Poems compiled by Yoel Hoffman. It reads:
How leisurely the cherry
blossoms bloom this year, unhurried
by their doom.
The words haunt and inspire me. How much of my life have I failed to enjoy, lost in the hurry of some imaginary doom? How will I choose to spend the rest?
Considering this, I poured myself a glass of iced tea, grabbed a piece of dark chocolate, and sat on the rocking chair on my front porch. I settled into the heat of the day, feeling the humidity wrap around me like a long embrace. A purple finch perched on the edge of the copper bird-feeder, glanced around, and flitted back to the nearby maple tree. A slight breeze played with the leaves of the oaks and cottonwoods on the hill across the street. I sipped my tea.
When I stood up a few minutes later to go inside, it felt like more than an hour had passed. But it hadn’t. There was still plenty of time.
On the farm, it’s easy to observe that being busy has very little to do with being productive. The crops don’t grow faster simply because the farmer is impatient, frustrated, or has a thousand things to do. Everything happens in its own time, exactly when it needs to. The rest of the world works this way too, but so much of our modern life makes it hard to see and even harder to believe.
So this summer, when that familiar panic starts to creep in, I’ve decided to resist its siren song. Instead, I will make Iowa Time. Unhurried, I brew my tea. Leisurely, I watch as everything around me blooms.
