Opinions

It’s been a few weeks since I witnessed the episode I’m about to describe, but I’ve been more or less haunted by it ever since. The window over my desk, where I spend a lot of time writing and daydreaming, looks out at a row of walnut trees along our lane. There are two constants in the scene, for the most part. One is there are birds visiting the lane to peck at the gravel for the grit that is necessary for their gizzards to function.

Clowns have always been frightening to little kids. The recent epidemic of scary clowns doesn’t surprise me, for I remember the clowns of my childhood as alarming. To my young eyes, they were noisy, unpredictable, invasive and extremely odd in appearance. We went to the circus at least once every year, sometimes twice if more than one troop of performers came to town during a summer.

Now that the election is over with, we can relax a little every time the telephone rings and hope the call is from someone we actually know and wish to talk to. Enough with the surveys and polls and political pitches. Nearly every one of those calls started out with a recorded message, and after a lifetime of feeling guilty about being rude, I’ve been able to hang up on them without apology. I guess I got the most satisfaction from hanging up, several times, on Donald Trump.

It appears that flooding is getting worse in spite of our best efforts to prevent or control it. While we make remarkable progress in other fields, it seems we are losing ground when it comes to dealing with our swollen streams and rivers. And “losing ground” is an apt expression when we see our precious black Iowa farmland running away down our rivers at such an alarming rate. This is closely related to the problem of a decline in the quality of our drinking water.

As I look back, I find it odd our summers on the acreage were so isolated compared to life in our former neighborhood. Even though there were classmates within shouting distance, we seemed to cut off contact once school was out for the year. Summer vacation put us in a different world we seemed to accept as normal, even though nobody indicated in any way the rules had changed.