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Corn Fields and The Amish Superstore

 


    The elder generations of my family love a remote location. My grandparents Tierney relocated from Denver to North Platte, Nebraska when I was in junior high school. My aunt and uncle followed them out there, as did my mother, some years later. My dad bought a house on some land in tiny Weldona, Colorado a few years back. Apparently, something in our DNA clicks over at some point, and we all decide that we need to move somewhere that has absolutely dire winters, and also takes forever to get to. The winters last eight months and there's nothing to keep the snow from drifting into seven foot piles? Awesome! It's at least two hours to a major airport? Perfect!
    All of this is to say I went to visit my family in their new digs (southeastern Iowa) last weekend. And from the moment I landed, I could not figure out my cardinal directions, and therefore spent three days basically lost amongst the rivers, streams, and corn fields of Iowa. My people did well: Ottumwa, where my grandparents and mom live now, is nearly two hours SSE of Des Moines. Sigourney, the town closest to where my aunt and uncle have landed, is 40 minutes away from Ottumwa. Congrats, team. We cut the distance from a major airport by over two hours!
    The most important part of the trip was visiting my grandparents. They're 91 now, and living in a care home in Ottumwa. They were three years younger than I am now when I was born in 1979, and I remember thinking when I was little that they were sooooo old. Now time has come for us all, and my visits were spent talking about when I was a kid, when they were kids, and all of us searching for our reading glasses at some point. It was a great visit: Grandpa told me some stories from when he was a kid that I'd never heard before. And they had the opportunity to brag about their 12 great-grandkids, which brought them a lot of joy.
    I also got to see the sights. The Victorian limestone extravaganza pictured above is the courthouse in Bloomfield, Iowa. Bloomfield is something out of a movie about life in the 1950s: The courthouse sits in the middle of town, and is surrounded on all four sides by rows of shops and diagonal parking spots. We visited a cool bookstore there called By the Hearth. Then we voyaged into Amish country, and stopped at a farm where we bought a watermelon, some freezer jam, a gigantic bulb of garlic, and a dozen eggs for $9. 
    Okay, we need to talk about this place for a minute: 
     Behold the Dutchman's Store. The only way I can think to describe this place is as the Amish Superstore. Seriously, if what you're looking for does not exist in this building, do you really need it? Among the things in this store: as much fabric as used to exist in a Jo-Ann's, aisles of kitchenware and flatware, shoes, clothes, toys, seeds for planting, all sorts of food, home decor, and one of the most interesting selections of books I've ever come across. I ended up with two skeins of hand spun alpaca yarn for $28, which is an insane deal. If you ever find yourself in Cantril, Iowa, you should definitely check this place out, if for no other reason than to read the community notices board at the front of the store. 
    The best part of the trip was spending time with my mom. If you would have told me 20 years ago that she and I would one day be very close and talk on the phone almost daily, I would have thought you were lying. But I'm very fortunate that we've found our way to a closer relationship. And I'm glad that I got to go see where she lives now, meet some of her friends, and help her with some tasks that had been stacking up so she'd feel better about taking a three week detour to New Orleans to help with my nephews. 
  


 

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