Lovely Old Pennsylvania

There are few things that delight me more than driving past fields of corn. When we spent a year in Iowa, it took me almost ten months to begin appreciating the loveliness of the cornfields. In winter they were forbidding and eerie, wide stretches of wind-blighted desolation. Driving home from LaMars in January, I'd be blinded by sheets of blowing snow--once I became so confused at the debris swirling across with the flakes that I spied a white rabbit streaking in front of our fender. It must have been going eighty miles an hour, a white rabbit on a tiny snowmobile, ears laid back. Martin assured me that I was suffering some kind of mental illness and there had been no rabbit. Still I'm not entirely sure.

During the trip from Orange City, Iowa, to La Mars, where we drove to do much of our shopping, there was one tree, the only tree for twenty or thirty miles. It was tall and twisting on the smallest of rises with a sea of cornfields all around. I began looking forward to that tree, calling it by name: to me, a lover of trees, it was a sign of grace as I drove through that blank, barren landscape. The cold and the wind in that place left me breathless. One February I drove out to Walmart and bought a huge palm fern, which I stuffed into the back of our two-door Honda. It was freezing outside but the sun was strong and hot through the car windows. On the way home I sang out loud out of the pure joy afforded by this green tropical presence behind me. I do not think the palm weathered its brief contact with below 0 temperatures and thirty minutes of a car heater blasting, but it was worth the investment just for that giddy trip home.

Then came summer again, the summer before we left to move to Pennsylvania. The last two months of our stay in Iowa, the fields bewitched me: waves and waves of corn broken by bright explosions of sunflowers.

And then we moved east, back to my beloved forests of trees. No longer did I love one tree; there are so many that it is impossible to bestow my faithful affection on just one trunk and branches. Every day we walk or drive through an impossible richness of trees.

Some weeks ago, we drove home from holiday with Martin's family at Hershey; the drive home was spectacular in an eastern sort of way; farm houses, rolling hills, tiny towns filled with old bungalows, tiny farms and fields of corn and soybeans punctuated by fenced gardens of zinnias, echinacea, neat rows of vegetables.

Have patience through the chaos; wait until you get to the corn!


Here in this incredibly green corner of Pennsylvania, I never get bored by the seasons; a quick trip out of town and I am bowled over, every time, by beauty. Winter is long and a bit dreary, but there are no endless bare fields. Instead there are white rolling hills, houses tucked here and there, cattle like black checkmarks in the snow, and bright birds in the frozen garden. Every place I have had the privilege to live holds its own sort of beauty, but I do feel grateful that I have never had to look for it here. It is everywhere I turn, in the small gardens of my neighbors or the tiny creeks that wind through the valleys.