The Land of the Ancestors

I am writing this from Muscatine, Iowa, just a couple of blocks from the Mississippi River--pictures to follow once I get home! I am moved to talk about the deep feeling I get in my body when I come back to the land where I have spent nearly all the summers of my life, the land by the Mississippi where my ancestors settled in the 1850s. Today I drove down gravel roads and followed back paths while thunderclouds darkened overhead and lightning sliced to the ground. Rain splashed on my arms as I drove, and the corn stood in silent ranks nearby. I noted all the old barns and paint-stripped houses with their two or three stories, their windows like eyes looking upon the plains that stretches in all directions, a huge vista of land and sky.
I imagined my great-great grandmother Josephine settling here with her family in 1872 or so, not long after the lands were given up by the Sac and the Fox. I remember seeing when I was a little girl the house where Blanche, her daughter and my great-grandmother, gave birth to my grandmother Lulu. I feel deeply rooted and connected here, it travels to the bone and blood of my body as I drink in the delicious scent of rain-soaked grass and the aroma of mud and earth and corn. Through my eyelashes I can almost see the team of horses traveling these same roads, see the women going from house to house to help midwife each other's babies. I see the floods that attacked the land, and the snow and ice that mark winter here. With respect for the uniqueness of this place, I inhale deeply the rain-tinged air.
Seven miles away is Wapello, Iowa, where my mother is buried. I remember the intensity of insects and the almost tactile sense of corn growing just on the other edge of the cemetery during her funeral. I stop and speak for a few minutes to my mother, and reflect on our story, told in my memoir Don't Call Me Mother. I proudly see the epitaph that I chose "Daughter of Lulu and Blaine, mother of Linda Joy."
You see, I was letting her know I had broken the pattern of mother-daughter abandonment that trailed through our generations. I made her claim me finally, healing the disconnection I'd always felt with her. It is a paradox, because naturally I also felt deeply connected. Here in the peaceful quiet of the Wapello cemetery, all the sturm und drang that we lived out is quiet.
After I leave the grave, I come upon a gaggle of cud-chewing, dark eyed cows lying under trees, feet tucked up underneath, looking at me witih curiosity and unconcern. There they were, young ladies relaxing on a summer afternoon, observing the human cemetery while they created more milk for the evening milking. I spoke to them, and took their picture--also to follow!
The thunderstorms of today create an aroma that I welcome, a sprinkling of the earth that washes clean the leaves of the corn and waters the gardens that grow the huge red tomatoes of August in Iowa.
Tomorrow I say goodbye to the cradle of our family's origins and return to my current home in California, full of reminders of the land where we came from, the landscape of my ancestors.

Comments

[Linda Peterson]

Linda, I was thrilled to see a new post and then deeply moved by your piece. I love how you evoke the landscape and then reveal how deep the roots run, however tangled they might be. Can't wait for the pictures! Tell us more, please, about what being rooted feels like.