Ghosts

A few weeks ago, I drove from Davenport, Iowa to the nearby town of Muscatine...The trip has haunted me ever since...

I didn't meet any spooky ghosts, but memories from my past plagued me...shades of a past that just won't let me go...

Autumn's paint brush turned the once verdant Iowa landscape into a spectrum of browns, reds, oranges, and yellows ... flowering ditch weed lined the roads...stubble from harvested cornfields stretched out as far as I could see...White-gray clouds covered the sky, like brushed cotton...

The unmanicured Muscatine County landscape seemed distorted through the tears in my eyes...memory was thick and heavy like fog...I felt small, alone, and frightened...Yet my car kept moving forward...

I grew up in Iowa...as a child, I never thought I wanted to live anywhere else...yet I didn't fit in...anywhere...I was shy and unsure of myself...in public, I'd hide behind characters I played and in my head, lived out fantasy...Often I'd ride in the back seat of my parents' car as we'd ride on these same roads, watching the world go by...

As a young adult, I drove on this highway to work and school.  Here I gained independence, tested my life-wings...learned that it really doesn't get easier when ya get older...

Then I moved away from home and wanted nothing more than to come back to Iowa...to find the security I imagined I had...This landscape became idealized in my head as an emerald sea of corn and beans with little red barns and smiling cows...

Now I come back home and its fall, the trees are turning, the fields are harvested, and brown weeds line the road...

Ghosts are everywhere around me...