This week we welcomed Captain Haubold and bid “fair winds and following seas” to Captain Greg Coy who is going to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii to serve as Deputy Commander, Submarine Squadron 1.

Note: Most people associate a boat christening with a woman and broken bottle of champagne. That would be me on Jun 17, 2022. But the story of a boat sponsor christening a Navy vessel is about a special long-time relationship between a woman chosen by the Navy to care for the crew and families of for the rest of her life. The officers, crew and families of the USS Iowa SSN-797 refer to me as the “mom of the boat”. What follows are the remarks I made at the christening. I hope my stories will help you understand why I was chosen and what the honor means to me. On April 5, 2025, I will be charged with “bringing the submarine to life.”

Christening Keynote

Some Iowa history books translate the Ioway Indian word IOWA as ‘beautiful land”. Others say it means, “the land between two rivers”.

Raygun, a well-known Des Moines t-shirt shop produced a t-shirt that says, Iowa, 75% vowels, 100% awesome.

My favorite Iowa song was written by Iowa composer Meredith Willson of Music Man fame and sung to troops during WWII by Bing Crosby. It begins; “Iowa, it’s a beautiful name when you say it like we say it back home. It’s the robins in the tree-tops, it’s the postmaster’s friendly hello.” Sentimental, for sure, but it speaks to what we call, “Iowa Nice”, a commitment to common decency and a friendly demeanor honed by hundreds of years of living close to our neighbors in small, often remote, communities.

President George W. Bush got it right when he said to me one day, “You know, Iowans are always nice to you even if they don’t like you.”

There are 250 towns in Iowa with less than 150 people, the approximate number of sailors aboard this submarine. I’ve climbed all over this boat and there’s not much elbow room. It’s a lot like living in small-town Iowa. Everyone knows your business. You must get along to survive. Out of necessity you build a tolerance for the idiosyncrasies of your neighbors and learn a healthy respect for their special talents. Call it a survival tactic. Call it Iowa Nice. I call it home.

I am honored to be the sponsor of the USS Iowa SSN-797 that we will christen today. I want to thank former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus for giving me the opportunity to serve my country and the Navy in this way. I accept responsibility for the crew, the officers, and their families for the rest of my life.

It is the tradition of the Navy to honor a woman as sponsor. I’ve been interacting with the crew and their families since 2015, attending picnics here in Groton, gifting books about Iowa to new babies. Clapping virtually when crew members earn their dolphins.

It is also a tradition for the sponsor to choose a successor, and I have asked our granddaughter Caroline to carry on when I am no longer able. Her sister Amelia and her cousin Ana are too young to agree to sponsorship, but I imagine they’ll be willing to help as they get older and understand the responsibility.

As the sponsor of the first nuclear submarine built to accommodate women, I would like to note that the world has changed since the first female sponsor was honored by the Navy in 1846, the same year that Iowa became a state. Therefore, I hope grandson Jake who is interested in military history and grandson Cassin, who is named for Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Cassin Young, will also commit to supporting their sisters and the submarine until it is no longer in service.

You’ll hear me talk about families today—mine and yours--especially the children, because the purpose of this submarine is to keep them safe so they may experience the freedoms my generation has enjoyed thanks to the sacrifices made by those who came before us.

This fast-attack nuclear submarine is the 4^th Navy vessel named for our state, including the mightiest battleship of WWII, USS Iowa BB-61, now a museum in the Port of Los Angeles. As a sponsor, I follow in the footsteps of Iowan, Iola Wallace, wife of Vice President Henry Wallace, who, like my husband, Tom also served as Secretary of Agriculture.

I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t had the good sense to fall in love with Tom Vilsack from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Thanks for an amazing 50 years! I also had the good sense to convince him to come home with me to Iowa to live, work and raise our two sons, Jess and Doug. Jess and Kate live next door to us in rural Iowa, and Doug and Janet live in Denver. Thanks to my family for taking time to join us today.

Thanks to fellow Iowa teacher, Kelly Sullivan, sponsor of USS The Sullivans DDG-68, a ship to honor the 5 Sullivan brothers, including her grandfather, who were all killed at sea in World War II aboard the USS Juneau. She has been a great mentor and friend.

Thanks to the policymakers and military leaders who have worked together to set our foreign policy priorities for defense, diplomacy, and development to assure our safety and economic prosperity.

Thanks to my Missouri cousins for coming to honor their dad who served in the Navy in WWII. Thanks to Tom’s cousins whose father, Charlie Young, commanded the 2^nd nuclear submarine, the USS Thomas Edison. This isn’t their first christening! And thanks to former Marine Bill Henninger from Pittsburgh.

In a way it’s fitting that I stand here today on Father’s Day Weekend. During WWII my dad flew PBY’s and PBM’s with his squadron out of Norfolk, VA. On Saturday mornings when our boys were growing up, he’d stop by for coffee, and he’d tell stories about the Navy and the camaraderie of the men in his squadron.

Dad rarely saw these men after the war, but he made them come alive for me in his stories. Carkhoff from Wisconsin sent us cheese. Sneed was a Virginia tobacco farmer. Darst was a descendant of a man whose name is written on the wall of the Alamo. My dad, who’d never known anyone Jewish, stood up Mike Falk of Philadelphia when he didn’t get the promotion he deserved. Dad was best man at Pete Pederson’s wedding and attended his 50^th wedding anniversary in California.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve heard the story of the appearance of the USS Iowa in the harbor at the Norfolk Naval Station after it’s “shakedown cruise”. I’m glad he eventually wrote the story in a letter to a Norfolk official in 1985. It said, “We would taxi by the USS Iowa when we were positioning for takeoff for patrol flights on anti-submarine patrol in the coastal battle of the Atlantic. It had been there for about two weeks, and we always speculated as to what it was doing there so long. My flight log would indicate it was November 27, 1943.”

A Commodore appeared at that morning’s briefing. He said, “Gentlemen, I have a very important mission for you this morning. The Battleship Iowa with the President of the United State aboard left X-ray Sugar at 0:600. Get with her and stay with her until dark.”

My dad said it was almost unheard of for the President of the United State to leave the country during war time. Later he learned that FDR was on his way to meet Churchill and Stalin in Tehran.

So here I am, the Naval aviator’s daughter, ready to christen the next USS-Iowa with his great grandchildren to help me. How cool is that?

Experiences become stories. Stories create relationships. Relationships build trust. Trust creates competence. Competence keeps us safe. Building relationships is just as important in keeping us safe as building submarines.

To the builders: the welders and the electricians, the engineers, the executives of General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton and Huntington Ingalls industries in Newport News. This submarine is mighty and strong, the best in the world. Thanks for your many talents. Please share your stories of building this masterpiece of technology with your children and grandchildren. You deserve to feel proud. They deserve to be proud of you.

Captain Powell and my Iowa crew: There is so much about your missions that you won’t be able to talk about with us now or maybe ever, but promise me you’ll share with the people you love, the stories of the friendships you develop as Navy submariners. You can take a lesson from the retired Iowa submariners on the Commissioning Committee, who are master storytellers. I guarantee your stories will outlive you.

Because my father flew with men from so many different cultures and regions, he came back to small-town Iowa a different person--more tolerant and more open to new and different ideas. For that reason, he insisted that I too travel outside my state and country to expand my worldview. It was the best advice he ever gave me.

I thought of this when I got an email from Tom’s cousin, Navy pilot retired, Cassin Young, who is in the audience today. He’s a graduate of the Naval Academy like his father and grandfather. He asked if he could invite his long-time friend from their time at Annapolis, Wally Poleshay, the son of Ukrainian immigrants who lives in Bettendorf, Iowa.

Since we laid the keel 4 years ago, the Iowa Commissioning Committee, led by Doug McCrea, has brought more than half the crew to Iowa. I learned to use a chainsaw while we cleared debris after the Derecho. We’ve met up during RAGBRAI, flipped pork chops at the State Fair and traveled the state talking with students about STEM jobs and answering their questions about living on a submarine. “How long can a nuclear submarine stay down?” the kids always ask. ‘Thirty years or until we run out of food,” the sailors always answer. Iowans have opened their homes to crew members for Thanksgiving dinner. They’ve taken them to town festivals, sporting events, museums, and the Capitol.

Before today’s christening, the crew anointed the sub with waters we gathered and mixed from Iowa rivers. That’s even better than champagne. Let me close with this refrain from the Gospel Song River of Jordan which speaks to this moment.

There is only one river

There is only one sea

And it flows through you and it flows through me

There is only one people

We are one and the same

We are all one spirit

We are all one name

We are all the father

Mother, daughter, and son

From the dawn of creation

We are one.

Fellow Iowans: For these men and women to successfully complete their missions in close quarters and dangerous waters, we need to make their work is our work. As we all go about our daily lives, please keep them and their families in your thoughts and prayers. Thank you.

LAGNIAPPE:

Navy ceremonies include lots of “bells and whistles” Sone navy personnel are trained in this communication system. Here’s a sample from the Change of Command ceremony.

In 2015 the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus called to ask if I’d accept the role of Sponsor for the newest Virginia-class nuclear submarine which he was naming the USS IOWA (SSN 797). The sponsor of each naval vessel is a woman who accepts responsibility for the crew and their families for the rest of her life or until the vessel is decommissioned. Most people only know the sponsor as the person who crashes the champagne bottle at the boat’s christening. That is a highlight, but only one chapter in a rich relationship that started at the keel-laying ceremony when my initials were welded into the keel of the boat in the Electric Boat shipyards in Groton, Connecticut. There I met the first 50 members of the crew.

Since then, the crew has grown to 135, we’ve christened the submarine, and two years later commissioned it, meaning the Navy deemed it fit for action and accepted it into the fleet. Over the past seven years crew members have married, babies have been born, captains and their families have come and gone. We’ve also grieved the death of one of our sailors.

Eventually the boat went from two halves, built in two different places, to a whole. During those years I’ve visited Groton to watch a talented group of craftsmen and women labor to build the boat. At the time the of its christening, the USS IOWA (SSN-797) was the most sophisticated fast-attack nuclear submarine in the world, also the first to be outfitted to accommodate women. During the pandemic I met with the spouses organization and crew and officers by Zoom. Through the years I’ve attended picnics, given the boat’s children books about Iowa and flower seeds from Seed Savers in Decorah to plant in their gardens.

In all that time, the lowa Commissioning Committee and the Submarine Veterans of Iowa and their families have helped bring officers and sailors to Iowa so they could get to know their name-state. They’ve been here for Veterans Day. We’ve taken them to schools to talk with students about their various jobs on the boat and the kinds of education it takes to become a submariner. They’ve attended university football games, Irish Fest in Waterloo and ridden their bikes across the state on RAGBRAI.

Every summer a contingent comes to the Iowa State Fair and stay with host families. While they’re here they also visit the Veterans homes in Des Moines and Marshalltown and pay a visit to the Gold Star Museum that honors the military service of all Iowa Veterans.

This year Tom and I hosted a tour and dinner at the World Food Prize for the crew and their host families, including the new president of the Iowa Sub Club, Ruan Senior Vice President Paul Jensen and his wife Karla. We were also joined by my successor, our 12-year-old granddaughter, Caroline, and her family.

The dinner gave Tom a chance to get to know Officer Scott Buzzard, the Chief of Boat (COB) who comes from Pittsburgh where Tom grew up. Since they have sports teams in common, Tom presented him with a football signed by Steeler tackle, Alejandro Villanueva, an Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan.

But the highlight is always the State Fair. The Fair helps our sailors and officers understand the importance of our agricultural heritage, our economic dependence on the quality of our soil, the work ethic of those who first broke the soil and the wealth it brought to our communities most of them with populations of less than a 1000 people.

Thousands of veterans and their families from all over Iowa participated and watched the State Fair Veterans Parade, and the USS Iowa sailors got a warm welcome from the crowd. Afterwards, Brooks Reynolds at JR’s South Park Ranch treated the crew to lunch. I noticed a lot of chicken sandwiches with a smear of lobster and lots of mac and cheese with pickles.

Supply Officer, Leslie Dickey, who grew up in Houston, explained that her job is to make sure the boat is equipped with everything it needs for deployment. Her job is more understandable now that we’ve read about the USS Abraham Lincoln, which faced resupply delays and food shortages near the Strait of Hormuz.

Zachary Summer and his wife Stepanie left their four children behind to spend a few days getting to know Iowa. Stephanie is a proud Navy spouse, but she also is proud of home-schooling their children and writing and illustrating children’s books, a career she can take anywhere.

Shayline Maia was born in the U.S. to Brazilian parents. She spent some of her growing up years in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Iowa reminds her of the summers she spent in the Brazilian countryside. After returning to the U.S., she’s lived along the East Coast. This was her first trip to the Midwest. Zachary Pierce from Ohio, says Iowa reminds him of home.

One of our guests was Aussie Cody Lewis, who is one of a number of Australian Navy members training alongside American crewmembers to operate nuclear-powered attack submarines. “I like the community feel here in Iowa. It’s beautiful!” Cody says Des Moines reminds him of his hometown, Adelaide a small city where you can get everywhere in 20 minutes.

Emerald Robinson from Jackson, Mississippi was surprised at the openness of Iowa’s landscape and our appreciation for the military. “I don’t think I expected that since it’s a landlocked state,” she said.

Roel Caballero liked Iowa so much he came back for a second year. He stayed with Mike and Shelly Neubauer who live on 23 acres near Woodward, which gave Roel a chance to experience a small community and see how everyday Iowans live. Mike served on a sub for six years as an electrician. Roel is the boat’s Culinary Specialist Chief, which means he runs the kitchen. The crew were bragging on him because the USS Iowa (SSN-797) won first place in a competition among East Coast submarines for best food. I can vouch for that since I enjoyed “hamburger day” with Captain Coy and the crew on the boat when I visited last year. “He liked the bars my wife Shelley made, so he asked for the recipe, which includes a cake mix and chocolate,” says Mike. Roel promised to serve the crew Shelley Bars soon.

Several crew members checked out the price of homes in Iowa and said maybe they should move here. The communities surrounding Groton provide beautiful vistas of the ocean, but they also attract tourists and people who can afford summer homes, which means congestion and higher prices.

It’s a tradition for the Commissioning Committee to give a submarine named for its state, a gift. Near the end of their visit, COB, Scott Buzzard, took the sailors for a sneak preview of the tabletop art custom-designed by STICKS to remind USS IOWA sailor of their “name state” and to brighten their “mess” and common areas. The COB has taken a personal interest in working with Rachel Eubank owner of STICKS to assure that the tabletops accurately represent the Navy and the boat. When the tabletops are completed and installed in a few weeks, STICKS will share images of their work with Iowans. Applause for the 30 artists who worked on the project.

One tabletop is a stately representation of the USS-Iowa battleship, BB-61, which is now the Battleship Iowa Museum in the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. There are tributes to the Hawkeyes, Cyclones and Panthers, our state university sports teams. There are depictions of our State Fair and other iconic places that the crew has visited.

The art will brighten the submarine’s confined spaces and remind the crew how proud Iowans are of their service to our country.

This week I’ll travel to Groton for a “change of command” ceremony to celebrate the tenure of Captain Gregory Coy and welcome our new captain, Kyle Haubold, his wife Stacy and their three children. Captain Haubold comes to us from the USS Hyman Rickover (SSN-795) where he served as Executive Officer. I wonder where he grew up, who his parents are, where he went to school, why he joined the Navy and how I can help with his new assignment.

The sailors I met this week are a microcosm of the USS IOWA and a microcosm of our democracy. The sub, powered by a nuclear core, is also powered by men and women with diverse skills from different ethnic and geographic backgrounds: African American and Latino, from the coasts and the midlands, from cities and small towns. They are the children of farmers and factory workers, teachers and business owners, with community college or advanced degrees, living together in a tube, getting along because they must to ensure the safety of the rest of us. Fight Iowa!

Every year for the past 35 years, we’ve made our annual trek to Ocean City, New Jersey for a week on the beach where my husband Tom vacationed with his Pittsburgh family every summer as a child.

When our boys were in middle and high school, they’d bring a friend, and we’d drive two cars from Iowa to haul all our stuff to the rental. In college, son Jess spent the summer as a beach-tagger and bouncer at a bar in nearby Sea Isle City which attracted a younger crowd. Years later Tom and I arrived from DC in a black SUV with security. Now we come from Iowa on a direct flight to Philly and rent a car for the hour and half drive. In all those years, I never encountered another Iowan. The anonymity was a welcome reprieve from our public lives.

Sometimes we’d come to drown our sorrows: the death of a loved one, a political defeat. Sometimes we’d celebrate: a political victory, 50 years of marriage. Now it’s mostly just the two of us, but our boys and their families join us when they can. In our early years, that’s what I yearned for-- to someday have three generations of our family together, to have the family photo by the iconic lifeguard chairs with waves lapping at our feet.

Ocean City’s that kind of place. Originally a Baptist church camp, it is now a year-round home to 11,200 and at its peak roughly 150,000 visitors spread across eight miles of oceanfront beach during a typical summer week.

The Boardwalk is 2 ½ miles of family entertainment. Alcohol is not sold on the island or allowed on the beach. Most of the rentals accommodate three to four-generation families and it’s not unusual to see 80-years-olds building sandcastles with 4-year-olds, pregnant moms in bikinis. new parents peering into beach cribs, teenagers playing paddleball with their grandparents.

So much about every ocean beach is the same, but every beach also has its own vibe. I’ve tried to capture what makes our beach special in my Ocean City ABC’s. What makes your vacation spot special? Where did you go to listen to the waves? When did you first experience a beach, ocean or otherwise? What gifts did you bring home from the sea?

A: ALCOHOL, anniversaries, anonymity, Atlantic City: Just before we cross the bridge to get to Ocean City there are thriving liquor stores and a few restaurants that serve beer, wine and spirits. You can BYO to Ocean City, but you can’t buy it or drink it publicly on the island or the beach. Drinkers and gamblers travel to Atlantic City 20 north, just visible on a clear day.

B: BOARDWALK, beach-taggers, bocce ball, books, boogie boards: By 6:00 a.m. runners and walkers the 5-mile are doing the loop on the boardwalk. Bikers on no-gear bikes, with loaded baby seats are enjoying the sunrise. From 8 o’clock till noon, families peddle fringed surreys and scout out their favorite sticky buns and coffee. All the blue benches for people-watchers memorialize family members who loved to come “down the shore.”

C: CROWDING, college kids, crumbcake: Every year, when I arrive at the beach it takes days to adjust to the “crowding culture”. I stake out our spot before my morning walks up the beach to search for shells. I stretch out towels, leave space between the chairs, fill the bags of the “Cozy Cabana” with sand and scatter plastic buckets and shovels ready for castle-building. No matter. By the time we all arrive at the beach at 10, the Jersey and Philly folks’ umbrellas are touching ours. They’ve circled their chairs so close we can’t help but eavesdrop on their conversations. For years I found this rude, but I came to understand that they’re comfortable living close together in cities, in houses with no side yards or bushes to mark the lot lines. For a week, I must sacrifice my Midwestern need for space and listen to their sports banter, work concerns and family sagas.

D: Dolphins, dogs, donuts: Get to the beach early to watch dolphins leaping and dogs playing in the waves. Take your donut and a cup of coffee. Make sure to check the tide schedule.

E: Exercise:surfing, running, yoga, even biking in the waves. Take your pick.

F: FAMILIES, flags, Flounder: American flags fly from homes on every street. This year add the 250-year celebration banners plus college flags faded from generations of family members who have attended Villanova, Pitt or Rutgers

Just before we left the beach to get the plane home, I saw that someone nearby had hoisted a Hawkeye flag. “And you’re going to go talk to them, right?” asked my husband. “Of course.” That’s how I met Beth, Max and Hanna. “Growing up in the Midwest, my husband and I we just didn’t understand this. Houses two feet apart and all these people! We just thought it was the weirdest thing ever!” says Beth who grew up in Des Moines. “Fast forward, and our children were in college and down here every weekend, so we decided to get a place here. That was 14 years ago.” It turns out Beth’s mom, Susan Bruckshaw, was executive secretary to Ron Corbett who was Speaker of the Iowa House when Tom was governor.

Beth’s daughter Max and her cousin Hanna have the reverse of our situation. They grew up in the Philadelphia area but came to Iowa to visit their grandparents and spend time at the beach on Lake Panorama. In another reversal, Max and Hanna, now in their late 20’s attended the University of Iowa, which explains the Hawkeye flag they raised hoping that Cooper De Jean, now a defensive back for the Eagles, also an Iowan who played for the Hawkeyes, might be at the shore, see it and stop by. They got me instead.

Later Tom assured me that Cooper wouldn’t be near the Jersey Shore now that preseason football has started.

G: GHOST CRABS, grandparents and great grands: At the southern end of the island, Corson’s Inlet State Park is home to thousands of ghost crabs that resemble Star Wars characters. “Early-bird” walkers can see the nesting site for the endangered piping plover and black skimmer, but we also watch ghost crabs skitter across the sand and disappear into deep holes they’ve spent the night digging. This year our five-year old granddaughter Ana and her mom Janet came shell hunting along the inlet where scallop, whelk, mussel and oyster shells are protected from the pounding waves.

H: Horseshoe crabs

I: Italian Ice

J: Jersey corn (It just doesn’t compare)

K: Kites

L: Lifeguards: This week there’s lifeguard training for local high school kids, who make good money and put themselves through college keeping visitors safe along8 eight miles of Ocean City beaches. OC Beach Patrol put on quite show when young men and women take the iconic 17- foot wooden lifeboats out for a spin into the waves. Some compete in over 70 South Jersey Lifeguard Boat Races each summer.

M: Music on the beach never competes with the sound of waves. Stragglers enjoy a bit of music and a few clandestine beers on the beach after families have left, but “earphones in” is the unwritten rule. For live music families attend concerts at the famous Music Pier. Springsteen has never performed a live concert at The Pier, but local bands perform lots of Bruce tributes. We just missed the Temptations and Judy Collins.

O: OCBP sweatshirts, tee shirts and merch. Othello (see Readers)

P: Patriotism vs. Politics. I did not see one political sign anywhere in Ocean City this year. I did not hear anyone talking about politics or reading a book about politics. We all go to the beach to leave politics behind for a few days. (For Patriotism, see Flags)

Q: Quiet

R: As I walk the beach, I check out what everyone is reading. Elin Hildebrand, graduate of the famed Writer’s Workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa; romance writer, Jennifer Weiner; Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, Daniel Silva’s Ransom. Many people read on tablets, phones and Kindles but the number of hard-copy books is striking. As I pass three college girls slouched in beach chairs reading, one title catches my eye. Othello. Impressive.

Early one morning on a barren stretch of beach I spot a woman in her plaid pajamas reading a thick volume. I asked about it, and she held up, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. I added it to my list then told her about Ann Patchett’s Whistler. We ended up talking books for 20 minutes. We were both English majors in college and now she’s a psychologist in Philadelphia. Before day’s end we’d texted each other our photos of sunrises over the ocean. I’m sure our paths will cross again.

S: Seagulls, surf camp, sunburn and sand burn, (from body surfing and boogie boarding in rough waves) shells, subs, sunrises, surreys, sticky buns, sandcastles.

T: Tides

U: Umbrellas, but the newest fad is the Cozy Cabana, an umbrella tent anchored by sand-filled bags.

V: Three generations of Vilsacks on the beach.

W: Weather, walking, waves. Eleven-year-old grandson, Cassin, was king of the 55^th Street Beach boogie boarders, body surfer extraordinaire, taught by his dad, Doug who was taught by his dad, Tom, who was taught by his dad Buddy.

X,Y, ZZZ’s Falling asleep to the sound of those perpetual waves. What could be better?

“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.” - Charles de Lint. This summer I returned for my 10th summer of volunteering with Sierra Service Project in Teec Nos Pos, AZ, which is part of the Navajo Nation. I was joined by over 40 other youth and young adult volunteers and adult counselors for a weekof service. This summer’s theme was Wonderfully Made and Wildly Connected. While I do believe we are all wonderfully made, boy was I in for a surprise for all the wild connections I would discover over one short week.

(In case you’re not familiar with Sierra Service Project or the guest author Bri Dennison, this post from last year explains.)

Covering over 270,000 square miles, the Navajo Nation extends into three states: Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Their tribal government was established in 1923 and currently presides over a population of over 250,000. Known as Diné Bikéyah, or Navajoland, it is bigger than 10 of the US states. The Teec Nos Pas Chapter that hosted us is also home to the Four Corners Monument, on which one can stand in four states at once.

The Navajo Nation was established in 1868 after the Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed. The treaty gave the Navajo back their ancestral land after they were forcibly removed during the Long Walk of the Navajo. The Long Walk was actually a series of forced marches from 1864-1866 from the Navajo’s lands to eastern New Mexico. They were placed in an internment camp meant for half their population. This resulted in the death of around 3,000 Navajo people in four years. I wish I could be glad there are no wild connections to this in America today.

America’s sins weren’t something we could solve in one week, but we could make some major progress on our project. My work team was assigned a wheelchair ramp for our homeowner, Beverly. I was once again paired with a group of mostly middle school youth volunteers, including two that had been in my group last year. We ended up sanding and staining boards, pouring concrete, and putting up the top railing that the handrail would get attached to. The concrete was the most impressive part in my opinion - my work team of five 12-14 year olds mixed and poured 32 bags of concrete. That’s 1,920 pounds of concrete in one day!

One of the youth volunteers who was also on my work team last year, Brady, hardly said an entire word all of the week we spent together last summer. I actually cheered out loud when he said a single word in our group on the last day, because it was so rare to hear him speak. This summer, I heard him talk more each day than he had the entire week last summer in my group. Part of this is being a year older, and having been at SSP before. But I like to hope that the welcoming environment and belonging that SSP strives to bring to each week helps.

Sarah, one of the teens who came with the same group as I did, but was in a different work team, is on our Youth Advisory Council (YAC) and is also a youth board member through YAC. This means she sits on our board and has a vote that counts just the same as the adult board members. This was the first year I’d been with both her and her older brother, and it was neat to see Sarah be the one who knew what was going on and who was known by quite a few people instead of feeling like the typical younger sibling tagging along. It was pretty funny to see her older brother’s face when we confirmed Sarah was, technically, (one of) the boss(es) of SSP’s executive director by sitting on the board.

Possibly the most unexpected connection was the amount of Staff Alumni who happened to be counselors that week. Five of the eleven counselors there were all former staff members, and four of those five during overlapping years. Getting to reconnect and know each other as adults, hearing about their families and lives after over a decade of seeing each other reminded me of the interconnected web that is SSP. Two of the counselors, Martin and Kelly, met at SSP, and are now married with two kids. Now their kids can’t wait to be old enough to attend and Kelly is saving her old staff shirts so their kids can wear the “retro” ones and be cool.

A small, but funny connection happened when reading the Letters to the Editor in the Navajo Times. I am no longer professionally involved in the political realm, but the political science nerd in me is still quite fascinated by local politics. There was a letter referring to upcoming proposed changes to the Navajo Constitution, and it referenced remarks by someone with the last name Yazzie. I hadn’t even considered that my husband’s former unit commander from his enlistment with the Iowa National Guard was Navajo, and of course he’d have relatives here. I spoke to a community member who informed me that Yazzie is basically the equivalent of “Smith” as a last name on the Navajo Nation. In fact, while doing research for this column I ran into another Yazzie who created a mural of the Long Walk, but even a slim Iowa connection wasn’t something I was expecting in the Arizona desert.

One of the youth volunteers on my work team, Zoey, had the most transformational week. She made it very clear at the beginning of the week that she did not particularly want to be there, as she was recovering from an illness. I could empathize - I’d much rather be at home when I’m not feeling well instead of baking in the Arizona sun. Most of the youth volunteers know what they’re getting into with a week of service, or maybe are too shy to tell these adults they don’t know very well “no” when asked to do something. Zoey, on the other hand, had no problem telling me “no thank you” at the beginning of the week. No problem, we respect strong boundaries! She informed us each morning of how many days it was until she could have her phone back and reconnect with the outside world.

However, by Friday afternoon when attaching the railing, Zoey had become an expert in drilling pilot holes and inserting screws. In fact, she was so talented at it, she threatened to start charging us for her expertise! This is the especially cool side of SSP for me. Of course being able to give back to the communities we’re in is rewarding work. But empowering the youth volunteers to use power tools and discover new capabilities is an indescribable joy. Even better, on Saturday morning when phones were returned to youth volunteers, Zoey was the last to get hers back. Staff had announced that the youth volunteers could come get their devices, but they had to seek Zoey out because she was too busy soaking up the last moments with her new friends. I watched the staff member hand Zoey her phone, expecting excitement after hearing about it all week. Zoey simply stuffed the phone in her back pocket and kept chatting away.

It was easy to find that “everyday sort of magic” in one week with some wonderfully made human beings. I never could have imagined the various threads of my life I would find in the remote Arizona desert, but that’s just part of the SSP magic. Finding the interwoven bits of our lives to blanket us in community. What a gift to be reminded of the whispered voice, the unexpected friendships, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.

LANGIAPPE:

Wild, Wild Horses couldn’t stop me from recording this video.

I start with a small Early Girl tomato, one that gives just a little, so I know it’s ripe. My grandmother used to peel her tomatoes, but I like mine skin-on and I cut them thick after I’ve removed the stem and a bit of the core with a sharp paring knife. I pop two slices of white cottage bread into the toaster. The smell of bacon sizzling adds to the anticipation. Waiting for the toast, I lift the bacon from the pan, still pliable but thoroughly done and let a paper towel absorb some of the grease. I slather a generous amount of Hellman’s mayo onto both slightly browned pieces of toast and add some lettuce from my EarthBox on the deck. I cover it with the tomato slices, give them a few shakes of salt, add two strips of bacon and the top slice of toast. I follow with a press of my palm then grab a sharp butcher knife and cut it diagonally. I add a bit more mayo to the plate in case I want to add a little to the top of each triangle.

On the deck, surrounded by my herbs, and the over-story of old growth trees, I hold my sandwich and take that first bite starting at the corner. “Ahh…”

There is nothing better than a BLT on a hot, humid August day unless you follow it with a piece of “picked this morning” sweetcorn rolled in butter, with enough shakes of salt to cover the “ear”. That first bite is “heaven on earth in Iowa” .

The sandwich and the corn are all the better because I know the farmers.

Daniel and Gretchen Wilson sell their tomatoes at the Waukee Farmers Market in Old Waukee starting Wednesdays at 4. I’m reminded to get there early in a a recurring notation on my iPhone calendar. If I somehow miss them, I can go to nearby Adel on Tuesday or even Perry on Thursday. I’ve been known to call to see if I can meet them at the farm while they’re picking.

They are a father-daughter team. Daniel says he’s been growing tomatoes since he started teaching Ag just down the road in Stuart in 1974. After teaching high school Ag for 47 years, he’s now in the business of raising tomatoes. Gretchen joined him 7 years ago. She bakes the bread and tends the cucumbers, zucchini and peppers.

“I picked 150 pounds of tomatoes this morning,” says Daniel. They grow 800 plants in caterpillar tunnels, temporary season-extending greenhouses 16 feet wide and 50 feet long made with metal hoops covered by plastic. He says without this covering, he’s at risk of losing his plants to blight, which occurs in the humid Iowa weather.

“So, what makes a good tomato?” I ask him as I load the scales with Early Girls and a few Red Deuce.

“Growing in soil. Soil as opposed to dirt,” says Daniel. “Our soil is high in organic matter. It used to be a cattle lot for 50 years before I decided to make it a garden. It runs 15-18 % organic matter. That’s a lot of what makes a difference behind it.”

A woman beside me fills her bag. “They have the best tomatoes, don’t they?” I say.

“They’re the only tomatoes,” she replies, hands Daniel a twenty and says, “See you next week.”

“Well, what’s the difference between Early Girls and the Red Deuce?” I want to know.

“Early Girls are sweeter,” he replies. “I take a red deuce if I don’t want the juices running on my plate ,but if I got a salad, I always go with an Early Girl. Gotta have Romas too, for canning salsa, and catsup.”

Gretchen has a moment between customers, so I ask how she got involved. “I’ve always enjoyed the garden. The opportunity just presented itself to move down here to work with Dad. My values have changed with life. Dad’s around the corner. Mom’s over in Stuart. Just to be closer to family,” she says.

Before becoming a small farmer, she’d been in a corporate position, working in Boone for Monsanto that became Bayer. When she’s not growing and selling produce, she’s helping a non-profit that started in Boone called Sleeping Angels. She’s wearing their t-shirt at the farmer’s market and between customers she sits on a folding chair in their tent planning a golf tournament that will raise funds to help with burial costs for families around Iowa with still-born babies and children who die before the age of one. She’s a multi-tasker, for sure.

On the drive home from old Waukee, I stop for gas. I’ve noticed a young woman sitting in the right-of-way on Ute Avenue everyday under a small tent. Today she’s joined by an older woman. I need sweetcorn, so I walk over while my tank is filling.

“I know you,” says Melody Miller, who tells me she used to teach in Corning and Lenox. I’ve been to their schools and public libraries, I remember. She’s here helping her granddaughter Briela Mendez who has turned growing and selling corn into a summer job that will likely fund her college education. She just graduated from Norwalk High School and will start her freshman year at Dordt University in Sioux Center after sweet corn season ends.

She wants to study agronomy and tells me that Dordt is second in the state after ISU for their agronomy program. Every time I’ve driven by, she’s had her head in a book, so I thought she might be an English major. “I like being outside,” she said. “I wanted to go into psychology, but as much as I love school, I don’t want to be inside all day.” She says it was her Grandpa, Tom Miller’s idea for her to grow and sell sweet corn. He and Melody have 17 acres, mostly wooded near Winterset, with some loamy, lowa soil for growing corn, in this case sweetcorn.

Briela helped pick 250 dozen ears of corn this morning. They had to hire a few more people to help pick and sell. They took some of the corn to Missouri and they sell the rest at Fleet Farm in Waukee, in Cumming and here at the Maverick on Ute Avenue.

It’s a Pioneer variety, “peaches and cream” which is more earworm-resistant,” Briela says. She has a scholarship for room and board at Dordt, but her earnings this summer will pay for her tuition.

“But what about those books I’ve seen you reading between customers?” I ask. She keeps them in a plastic crate beside her camp chair. Today she’s reading Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. She says the Winterset Public Library has a good sampling of his writing. She just finished Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The 2019 adaptation is her favorite movie, and the book is now her favorite book. Another she hasn’t read yet is a freebie, also from the public library, What a 1000 Churches Prove about Spiritual Growth.”

She’s also got two Stephen Pinker books, Rationality-What it IS, Why It Seems Scare And Why It Matters and “The Better Angels of our Nature: How Violence Has Declined as Humanity Has Evolved,”

I like buying my sweetcorn from a reader, and it’s a good investment in the future of Iowa. A five-dollar bill buys me six ears. It’s ten dollars for a baker’s dozen. I like mine “picked today”, so I assure her I’ll be back often.

Minutes later it’s shucked and in a pot of boiling water. Ten minutes later it’s basking in butter. What’s not to like about that?

Now all I need to make the perfect effortless Iowa dinner is a Muscatine watermelon for dessert.

P.S. Access information about the USDA’s local food programs.

It takes the heart of a lion to recover from an ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke. But it also takes a caregiver with the loyalty of Penelope, physical therapists with the patience of Job, doctors with the expertise of Jonas Salk and family and friends with the steadfastness of Jack London’s dog, Buck. My parents aptly named my brother Dick for King Richard the Lionheart. His response to his stroke suffered while traveling with his wife Ali in Morocco last October proves he deserves the moniker.

When I visited him in February, he needed constant care. I visited him two weeks ago, and he was getting around with his walker, raiding the frig, and showering. He’d recently taken a 10-mile ride on a recumbent bike. Considering his doctors thought he wouldn’t live and certainly wouldn’t return to anything approaching normality, he’s outperformed their expectations and his own.

“FOR TEN DAYS HE LAY IN EXCRUCIATING PAIN”

Dick and his wife Ali were staying at an inn on a winding street in Marrakesh too narrow for a standard ambulance. They’d been hiking in the mountains and touring Morocco’s capital after visiting Dick’s daughter Jeni in Spain. When Dick woke in the night with no feeling on his left side, he told Ali that he couldn’t move. Stunned she went for help. The innkeeper and their tour guide carried Dick wrapped in blankets down steep steps to a pared-down ambulance that transported him to a better-equipped ambulance that raced to the hospital.

For 10 days he lay in excruciating pain in the ICU in what Ali calls “ high level of third-world care”. The hospital was clean, the staff was well-trained, but it lacked the high-tech equipment of a U.S. hospital. Patient beds were separated by curtains and feet away from the nurses station, where nurses congregated laughing and talking loudly.

“Dick doesn’t remember, thank God!” says Ali. Jeni arrived to help Ali make arrangement to get him home. They called the U.S. Embassy for help arranging an air ambulance. They did not have “med-jet” insurance, so they had to arrange for the transfer of money, and to do that Dick had to give verbal consent over the phone.

The flight included a doctor and a nurse. It took 11 hours. In Tucson, an ambulance met them on the tarmac to transfer Dick to the ICU at Tucson Medical Center where they were met by Dick’s son Sam and his wife Meg who live nearby.

For three and a half weeks after the stroke, the pain kept him from sleeping for more than five to ten minutes at a time. Ali describes the whole experience in one word: “Hell.”

Eventually he was transferred to Encompass, a rehabilitation hospital known for their aggressive treatment, including 15 sessions a week of cognitive, occupational and physical therapy. “Control over the left half of his body was gone, including his brain,” said Ali. Before he could go home, he had to learn to sit up. He could only stand belted and assisted by two people. Later, his neurosurgeon would determine that what started as an ischemic stroke began to bleed, destroying more tissue.

When I visited in February, I attended therapy sessions with them every day. He was working hard, making progress, commended by his therapists for his work ethic and attitude. We also attended a support group for stroke victims for the first time. They separated the patients from the caregivers, so I stayed with Dick. The stories varied depending on the ages of the patients and how recently they’d suffered their strokes. I was surprised that Dick seemed willing to share.

DEPRESSION WAS THE HARDEST OBSTACLE

I returned home, but the worst was still to come. Ali says depression was the hardest obstacle they had to overcome. Dick was angry that life as he’d known it, filled with long bike rides, woodworking and playing banjo, ukulele and the harmonica were over. There was only Ali to take it out on.

She says the caregivers support group “saved my life. I was a basket case, and they helped me up.” From the group, led by Leslie, she learned that stroke survivors often lose the ability to feel empathy for others. She learned that “we are all stroke survivors.”

Ali explains that Ashley, one of his occupational therapists, recognized Dick’s negative attitude, looked him in the eye and said, “Dick, you need to grieve.“ “That’s a scary thing to say to a man who is so determined,” says Ali.

Eventually Ali sought help from Dick’s doctor, who immediately upped the dosage for his anti-depressants, which changed his demeanor dramatically. “No matter how miserable he was, he still wanted all the therapy there was. He was fighting so hard and that makes a person intense,” Ali explains.

Dick’s son Jack and his wife Kirstin visited from Tennessee for Thanksgiving. In the new year, Jeni returned for a week so Ali could get a break and visit her daughter in Phoenix. After visiting her son at Easter, there was a dramatic difference in Dick’s demeanor. Three months later, “it’s 100 per cent better,” says Ali. Last month at the stroke group, he shared what a difference the medication had made.

A SUPPORT GROUP MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE

Having a family and friends support group makes a difference also. Law school friend, Guy Cook, has a place nearby and stops in often. Betsy Ajeman, oldest sister of Dick’s first wife Martha, lives in Wilcox near Sam and Meg. “She really sees me,” says Ali. “She took my shoulders in her hands and said, ‘Are you doing this alone?’” Betsy is also a caregiver for her husband who has mobility issues. Dick has been an important part of Ali’s grandchildren’s lives. This week Carmen, her oldest grandson, stopped to visit and to help. Mt. Pleasant friends lend support through calls and emails.

During our week together, Dick acknowledged his emotional swings. He understands Ali’s commitment. He’s sorry for his behavior. He is grateful for the care he’s receiving from so many. “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been,” says Dick quoting a line from the Grateful Dead’s song Truckin’.

We visited his occupational therapist, Emily, just back from a bike trip with her husband. She tested his grip, timed him placing and removing pegs from holes. She cites numbers to prove to him he’s improving.

Later, the acupuncturist stuck him with needles that made him look like an Arizona saguaro. Then she stimulated his vagus nerve with lasers. We also visited the technician who adjusted the customized brace that will force his leg to straighten when he tries to walk unassisted.

At home Dick practiced his deep and rapid breathing exercises, using his tablet to access direction in the Wim Hof Method. Studies reviewed by the National Institute of Health suggest the technique could have some effect on reducing inflammation and stress.

He teaches me about the vagus nerve, “the longest and most complex cranial nerve in our bodies, which acts as a two-way communication superhighway connecting our brains to our hearts, lungs and digestive tracts. It starts in our brainstem and travels down both sides of our necks though our chests and deep into our abdomen. It connects the ears, throat, vocal cords, heart, lungs, stomachs and intestines.”

Last Friday his neurosurgeon inserted in his chest a vagus nerve stimulator, recently approved by the FDA for stroke victims. According to the Mayo Clinic website, the device’s electrical pulses help make new pathways during exercise. Studies have shown improvement for regaining the use of affected hands and arms. Dick says it could also improve leg function.

Yesterday Dr. Sanan activated the device, only the second one he’s inserted. Dick will turn it on when he’s exercising or doing any functional tasks. The doctor will monitor his progress.

PIONEERING THE VAGUS NERVE STIMULATOR

Dick knows he’s pioneering the device. “I’m seeing this as another journey. Instead of moving the big muscles in my legs to get over a mountain, I’m now determined to just get my muscles to move again. Today I felt one move for the first time.”

He knows it may not work the way he wants, but he’s determined to try. He knows he’ll never use his power tools again, but he wants to gain as much use of his left hand as possible. “ I want to hold a knife and fork and cut my own meat,” he explains.

He has balance issues, but he’s determined to walk without assistance. And he wants to ride a bike. Ali drives him to the 70-mile bike trail that circumvents Tucson with “spokes” into every neighborhood. His friend Johnnie, a retired nurse, rides with him.

Now he’s connected with Jabe Gonder, Cedar Rapids, Iowa native, who works as an adaptive sports coordinator and mechanic for Southern Arizona Adaptive Sports, a Tucson-based nonprofit providing fitness and recreation for people with disabilities.

He loaned Dick a recumbent tricycle to try out and has encouraged him to join their group of riders, Southern Arizona Adaptive Sports.

The Adaptive Sports Iowa cycling team, which has grown to nearly 80 riders, just finished riding another RAGBRAI last week. One day during one of the eight RAGBRAI’s I rode, I was halfway up a hill facing headwinds and sweating with the heat and humidity. I decided to get off my bike and walk. Passing me on the right was a rider on an adaptive recumbent who could not use his legs. He used his arms to climb the hill. No way was I getting off my bike. I hope someday the guy next to me is my brother, the lion-heart. It might get me back on my bike again even if I have to walk up the hills.

LANGIAPPE:

The Grateful Dead: Truckin.

The little blonde girl smiled shyly beside her mom, holding her sign and looking expectantly down the jetway. Maybe her dad is in the service and is coming home from a deployment. I’m guessing she’s about 8. Her mom is pregnant. She’s excited too.

The line of deplaning travelers is endless. Just when she thinks he must surely be coming, another group comes out paying her no attention. The attendant tells her he’ll deplane last.

While checking my carry-on, I find myself beside the mom. “She’s pretty excited,” her mother says. “I’m excited to see him, too. He’s been gone a week!”

“Only a week? Is it your husband?” I ask, now intrigued.

“Oh, no, it’s her brother,” she says. “They fight constantly, but he’s been gone at camp all week, so we came to greet him.”

About that time, the boy, about 12, comes through the door, and the little girl throws her arms around him. Everyone is watching now, laughing like they’re watching a movie. The boy looks mortified.

My phone dings. “Happy Birthday,” it says.” It’s my brother Dick. He’s going to see me in a few hours when I arrive in Tucson to spend the week. I’ve carefully wrapped 3 ears of corn and a bag of tomatoes in my carry-on. He misses Iowa tomatoes.

Tucked in my suitcase are also “slides” taken on family vacations. I won’t be able to resist reminding him that the year he was potty training we had to ride for miles with the little chair on the floor of the back seat where my older brother and I sat. Dick got to sit on mom’s lap up front before there were seat belts.

I have thrown out the photos of places I cannot name, but saved the family photos, one of our parents dancing in the living room, and lots with us kids posing in our Sunday best or standing in front of mountains. Someday I want him to show his first grandchild, 3-month-old Sawyer, what we looked like as children.

My older brother was 11 when Dick was born, about the age of the boy who just got off the plane to be hugged by his sister. In the photos Dick’s a cute little kid, but he quickly went from cute to annoying. In eighth grade, I titled my first work of fiction, “Billy the Brat”. My teacher proclaimed me a writer. I believed her.

I was in first grade when Dick was born. When I met him, my dad told me he was named after two English Kings— Richard the Lion-hearted and King James the First. Helping care for him was the only experience I had with a baby until I had one of my own.

When he grew up, Dick lived two blocks from us in Mt. Pleasant where he and his wife Martha raised their three kids. He practiced law with Tom and my dad, so he was a part of my everyday life, but until this week I had never spent more than a few minutes alone with him. (Unless you count the day he invited me to take a bike ride then left me on a gravel road when I couldn’t keep up.) He was an avid biker even then, logging miles on country roads and riding RAGBRAI with friends.

Martha died about the time their children were leaving for college, the military and first jobs far from Iowa. We had moved to Des Moines. Grieving his loss, Dick retired early and left town. He accepted an offer to volunteer with the National Park Service at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in remote New Mexico. He had learned to build log cabins at the historic village in our hometown as a summer apprentice. He was an outdoorsman and an accomplished woodworker, so it was a perfect fit.

The National Park Service asked him to build a replica of a Native American ladder that would have been used by the cliff dwellers of the 1200’s. The other volunteers watched his painstaking attention to detail. Finished, the 20-foot ladder was too large for one person to carry up the long steep path to the historic site.

Among the many stories Dick spun in our few days together, was this one. It seems there were a bunch of college-aged hikers camping and partying at a campsite in the park. Dick knew they’d run out of beer, so he went into town and bought a couple of gallons of whiskey, stopped by the campsite and made a deal with the hikers. If they would carry the ladder a half mile up the trail, the whiskey was theirs. His supervisor, who didn’t know about the deal, was so impressed that these young men had altruistically volunteered, that he posted a photo of the 10 guys carrying the ladder on the website. “He didn’t understand the power of incentives,” he explains.

The second winter, he met volunteer, Alice DeMateo. After her divorce and a few years in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, Ali had come to “The Gila” to train for a climb to the base camp at Mt. Everest. In 2016 she made her climb. That year Dick rode the Great Divide Trail down the Rockies from Canada to Mexico where Ali picked him up. That winter they decided to become volunteer interpretive rangers at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. They invited their children to join them for Christmas.

Before meeting Dick, Ali describes herself as “outdoorsy” hiking, camping, biking, but never more than 30 miles. Gradually biking became a lynchpin of their new lives together. Now, any conversation with these two eventually evokes a story- a person, always a character, they met or rode with, an encounter with locals in countries all over the world, some they still correspond with or have visited, and some have come to stay in their “casita”

During our week alone together, Dick and I talked about our families, our childhoods, and all the “characters” we grew up with in Mt. Pleasant. We talked about the cases he tried as a defense lawyer and a few big plaintiff’s cases and class actions our law firm won. When we hear the quail outside chirping “bobwhite”, we talked about hunting, guns and our dad’s bird dogs. We talked about high school football and summer jobs.

He treated me to burritos at his favorite spots. I made Aunt Jessie’s potato salad and pork roast. We watched movies, exchanged book titles. I listened to sagas of bike rides that took him, and then him and Ali, to places made exotic because Dick rivals Mark Twain when it comes to storytelling.

Their first long trip together was from the northern most tip of New Zealand to the southern- most tip, ferrying their bikes between islands. “The next stop south of Bluff, New Zealand is the Antarctic ice sheet,” says Dick. Usually, they camped out because NZ has a custom of welcoming bikers to tent on their land, but on this day, it was snowing so they stayed in a hostel. “The next morning, we ate breakfast with an American expat who had been on the last helicopter out of Saigon. His name was Mick, and he worked for the CIA. When we met him, he was dealing in the sale of arms to third World countries. We took a ride with him the next day up to Invercargill where he was purchasing barrels for sniper rifles.”

They met Johnnie in a campground on the Pacific Ocean in northern California while riding the Pacific Coast Highway to San Diego. They discovered he lived just down the road from them in Tucson, and he’s become a friend. I wanted to meet Johnnie, but he was taking a train to Portland, Oregon to ride the Pacific Coast Highway for the fifth time.

Their most recent trip was not a bike trip, but a visit to the Spanish island of Ibiza to visit Dick’s daughter Jeni and her partner Jorn. Afterward, they traveled to Morocco for a hiking tour in the mountains and a walking tour of Marrakesh. That night, October 17, 2025, Dick had a stroke. In Ali’s words, “Then the BIG adventure began.”

If this were fiction, I could concoct a satisfying happy ending, but we all know that’s not how real life works. Real life requires more of us, which is how I ended up in Tucson last week helping my brother get to occupational therapy appointments, acupuncture, and laser treatments while Ali flew to Pennsylvania to attend a funeral for her sister, Susie. When it came time to say goodbye, I remembered the little girl at the airport and gave Dick a big hug. Next week, read to find out how biking and Johnnie reenter the picture. It’s a love story, a story of gritty determination, of friendship, of new life, with no end in sight. I’m no Mark Twain, but I’ll try to do him justice.

LANGNIAPPE:

In the Ozarks chatting with Mrs. McIntosh,“a smart and musical character telling us about making music, punctuated with her spitting as she’s got a chaw of her own tobacco in her cheek,” says Ali.

1963: Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John Kenndy.

l964: President Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam conflict.

l965: The Voting Rights Act became law.

1965: President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election.

1968: Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

1968: Senator Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning for president

1968: Vietnam War protesters battled police in the streets of Chicago.

1969: Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

1970: A resolution to ordain women in the Episcopal church was defeated.

1970, Ohio National Guard members killed four and wounded 9 other college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University.

1971, The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers.

1972, The voting age was lowered to 18.

1972: Title IX was signed into law.

1972: Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment.

1973:The Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.

1974: President Richard Nixon resigned to avoid being impeached.

In my first 13 years, I learned to love my country, an amazingly diverse land, an amazingly diverse people united by a document that became the creed that defines our democracy.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (The Declaration of Independence published July 2-4, 1776.)

The adult books my parents started giving me when I started high school were provocative and began to challenge my naive view of our country. Seven Days in May, a bestselling novel, introduced me to the idea of the possibility of the military overthrowing our government. I read Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, who is credited with launching the global environmental movement. They gave me “Black Like Me” whose cover read, “A white man learns what it is like to live the life of a Negro by becoming one!”

Over time, in high school and college classes, in my own personal reading, in discussions with family members, classmates, and in my early forays into politics, I began to understand that the creed articulated in the Declaration was more aspirational than realistic. As an adolescent and young adult, I realized that my country wasn’t perfect, that the founders, like all of us, were personally flawed. “How could my hero Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence own slaves?” I wondered. “How can we reconcile assassinations of two Kennedys and the Reverand Martin Luther King with the principles that guide our democracy?” “How could Richard Nixon, President of the United States shame his country by committing a crime?”

At the same time I was beginning to question my country and its leaders, our country was collectively accomplishing some earthshaking achievements- putting men on the moon, women gaining political clout, passing a Civil Rights Act that would eventually lead to electing our first African American President and developing the technology that led to iPhones and the Internet.

After the Kent State Massacre, when colleges let out early, my classmates protested the Vietnam War in Washington. I came home to Iowa to look after my family and to campaign for Lt. Governor candidate Minnette Doderer in the Democratic primary. Over time I discovered that I’m most comfortable working within the two-party system to improve my community, my state and my country.

Eventually, I realized that the same country which embraced an economic system based on slavery would also pass the Civil Rights Bill. The same country that was built by immigrants from all over the world could build a wall to keep them out. I came to think of our country as a work in progress, an evolution of drafts, starting with the Declaration. With each election cycle we keep drafting, editing, trying to create “that more perfect union” but never getting it quite right.

Earlier this month as we celebrated our 250^th birthday, I wrote about how I came to love my country as a child. This week I’ve been thinking about my adolescence and young adult years before I married and returned to Iowa to work, to raise a family, to become a political activist and eventually decide to run for office myself.

These were the years when I questioned my country while never giving up hope that we could fulfill the promises we made in the beginning and that I could be part of making that happen.

I have learned to love my country even when I think it’s taken a wrong turn or made serious mistakes. It’s no different than the love that develops between people in relationships which are often fraught with misunderstandings that require reconciliation.

No citizen needs to apologize for feeling ashamed of our country’s actions like starting an unwarranted war or of the behavior of our leaders who have lied, cheated or failed to the honor the oath they swore to uphold. No one should have to apologize for refusing to say “The Pledge”; for not standing for the national anthem; for marching in protest of some wrong that needs righting; for sending a letter to the editor to take politicians to task. The U.S. Constitution guarantees us the right to free speech. It’s our responsibility to exercise it.

I’ve been helped in my thinking about this by a book just published by Ben Rhodes, speech writer and deputy national security advisor for President Obama. The book, All We Say is a selection of 15 speeches he’s chosen which he thinks frame the question of American identity and the continuing battle to define it. Some of the speakers are unknown by most of us, and some of them will seem reprehensible says my husband, who recommended the book. I have only read the author’s preface which explains his purpose in writing it.

He says, “For two hundred and fifty years we have been having an argument in this country. It is an argument rooted in the compromises embedded in our Constitution, when a group of men with diverse views agreed to disagree about important things…Yet even as those debates have focused on different issues at different times, there have always been essentially two opposing stories about being American: two different notions of American exceptionalism that have remained in uneasy coexistence and occasional conflict with each other.”

“On the one hand, there is a story that views the nation as inherently right from the beginning, a particular promised land claimed by a particular people with a particular way of life…On the other hand, there is a story that views the nation as engaged in a struggle to live up to that founding promise in the Declaration of Independence: a multiracial democracy founded upon the idea of human equality.”

His preface quotes Frederick Douglass who wrote, “The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins.”

Rhodes chose these 15 speeches because he believes they “open a unique window through which we can better see our own history. They allow us to relive the story of America as it has been debated, described and redirected in the present tense since America’s founding.” In “All We Say “ Rhodes offers his perspective on why these speeches succeeded in saying something profound and consequential about American identity. I look forward to reading the speeches and his explanation for why he chose each.

I’m hoping the book will help as I continue to inventory my own journey as an American. I know I’m not alone in worrying about the strength of our democracy as we enter another election season. My journey, like many of yours, parallels our country’s journey: idealism followed by disillusionment, followed by regret and a determination to do better. As a result, my love for my country is so much deeper, more complex.

I enter the work required of me as a citizen by participating in the next round of elections with a resolve to encourage those brave enough to run for office for the first time and to inform the choices of voters in my own sphere of influence. I want to be more mindful of the diverse experiences of those who may think differently than I do about what it means to be an American. I want to listen more, talk less but speak up when I must. I want to find common ground where I can, however tenuous, but refuse to give ground on the rights I hold most dear.

You each have your own timelines, your own histories, your own complex relationships with our country based on ethnicity, country of origin, gender, military service, citizenship status, economic circumstances, education, work experiences and geography. I hope you share your own evolution stories with friends and family sometime during this year that we celebrate the 250^th birthday of our still very young country.

Lagniappe: “The Land of Hope and Dreams” is the song Bruce Springsteen sang at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center. Enjoy.

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A few weeks ago I told you a story about our next door, 6 year-old granddaughter Amelia, the “Boss Baby” and how she organized her mom’s birthday party. This repost is about counting American flags on our way to the public library and learning “the pledge”.

While you wait for a new column next week, I’ve put a “lagniappe” at the end of this one, an extra gift from the day we helped dedicate the Obama Presidential Center. Spoiler: Introducing, “The Boss”.

We all own the American flag. No group or individual can claim that by raising or saluting a flag, they love this country more than someone who chooses not to. Each of us has a relationship to our flag developed over the course of our lifetime. By hanging a flag, we say to all who see it, we love our country, and we stand in solidarity with all other Americans in celebrating our common support for the ideals on which the U.S. Constitution is based. This week, on June 14, we celebrate Flag Day. It’s not a national holiday, but it does commemorate the adoption of the American flag by the Continental Congress in 1777.

A recent trip with my granddaughter to a local public library helped me think about how our personal flag journeys begin and mature over time and how we can influence that journey for our children and grandchildren.

Enunciating each word, pronouncing them correctly, five-year old Amelia sitting in the car seat behind me spontaneously began: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

SAYING “INDIVISIBLE” IS HARD FOR ALL OF US

Startled at the clarity, I asked, “Do you know what it is to pledge something?” She didn’t. We talked about that followed by the meaning of allegiance, indivisible, liberty and justice. I saved republic for another time. (Most of us have a harder time with that one.) She explained that her preschool class says the pledge every day, hand over heart.

After that, she and I started counting flags on our way to the library. I’d take one side of the road, and she’d take the other, seeing who could find the most. I was surprised at how many we saw, some personal, some in front of businesses, and others in front of public buildings. It also gave us a chance to talk about why people fly flags. Most of us start our relationship with the American flag by reciting the pledge in school and as we grow older, we begin to add experiences that help us better understand the significance of a patriotic symbol like a flag.

Each of us has our own relationship with our flag. Not all parents want their children saying the pledge in school, and not all students as they get older and make decisions for themselves want to stand or participate. The Supreme Court has ruled that students can’t be required to stand or to say the pledge. You can read all about the decisions of the court at the state and federal level here.

We fly the US flag at our house and all the grandkids have learned flag etiquette although we are sometimes remiss at getting to half-staff as often as we need to. Our boys grew up helping to raise memorial flags for veterans at the Henry County Courthouse on Memorial Day. I grew up raising the flag at girl scout camp. Others have experienced the flag at athletic competitions, political events and in the military, to name just a few.

Recently surrounded by Iowa and American flags, representing all Iowans, I brought the USS Iowa SNS-797 nuclear submarine “to life” in Groton, CT. It was a proud moment for me and for our state.

9-11, THE DAY I TRULY CAME TO UNDERSTAND THE WORDS

But the day I truly came to understand the words I’d learned as a child, was September 11, 2001. Tom was governor. As first lady, I had left early for a breakfast with teachers in Iowa City followed by a meeting with folks at the University of Iowa Hospitals to talk about my literacy foundation and the work we were doing to give 40,000 kindergarteners a book about Iowa.

The meeting had just started when the state troopers with me rushed in to alert us of the attack on the World Trade Center. They brought us to a television where we watched as the second tower fell. We were riveted, in shock and frightened just like every other American watching that morning.

I called Tom to ask if we should come back to Des Moines. He asked me to continue with my day as planned. He said it was important to help create a sense of normalcy to tamp down the fear that would inevitably grip people across the country. At that time, we didn’t know that President George Bush would be flying safely above the state of Iowa as the day’s events unfolded.

Our security detail drove me from Iowa City to Marshalltown where I was scheduled to have lunch with Rotarians since the state’s Rotarians had pledged to support my kindergarten book program. As we drove Highway 30 across the state, I remember seeing a farmer out hanging a flag on his barn. By the time we neared Marshalltown there were flags attached to cranes at construction sites.

But where I felt the most visceral feeling was at the Rotary lunch. Most Rotary Clubs open every meeting by saying the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s hard to explain, but I felt like I was saying the pledge for the first time or at least understanding it for the first time. But I also felt like I was in just the right place on the worst of days. I was saying the pledge with a bunch of strangers, but we all shared a country with some basic beliefs embedded in the language of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.

Following the meeting I was scheduled to visit an 8^th grade language arts class at a Marshalltown middle school. Again, I felt right where I belonged. I had taught 8^th grade language arts in Mt. Pleasant for over 20 years. I was familiar with the book they were discussing that day. Ironically, Lois Lowery’s, The Giver, is about a boy, Jonas, who lives in a dystopian world disguised as a utopian society. All children are assigned a job once they become twelve years old. Jonas is named “the giver”, the keeper of the stories of his community before they gave up their rights to make their own decisions. Lowery’s story won the Newberry Award for its look at a society stripped of its individuality and committed to sameness. It is a story of taking away the freedom of people to make decisions for themselves.

A DAY-LONG CIVICS LESSON

It was a strange feeling talking about this book on what became known as 9/11, when the terrorist group attacking us convinced members of their organization to sacrifice themselves to bring down our democracy, to attack our way of life.

By the time I arrived back at Terrace Hill, I felt like I’d had a day-long civics lesson, which brings me to this week and the celebration of Flag Day. We are not actually celebrating a flag; we are celebrating what the flag symbolizes, those principles that my dad fought for in WWII, my classmates fought for in Vietnam and my nephew fought for in Afghanistan. It’s what the sailors of the USS-Iowa have accepted responsibility for and what most of us involved in political life are committed to.

GO HAWKS!

So, I count flags with our granddaughter, because I think we have a personal responsibility to teach the children in our sphere of influence the values our families hold dear, and I think as citizens we have a collective responsibility to teach our children what it means to be an American in all its complexity, including agreeing to disagree about almost everything.

One day as we counted flags I said, “Look Amelia, that house has two flags, one is our country’s flag, the other is our state flag, Iowa’s flag. See, it has three big stripes- red, white and blue.

“Gramma Christie,” she said, dismissively. “That’s not Iowa’s flag. Where’s the Hawkeye?”

I guess we have a little more work to do.

Lagniappe

The Boss singing “The Land of Hope and Dreams.”

The Fourth of July is days away, and I don’t feel much like celebrating our 250^th with public displays of patriotism. We’ll share fireworks with neighbors and make homemade ice cream with family, but this year I’m feeling out-of-sorts and more introspective.

We just rewatched the miniseries based on David McCullough’s book that we both savored about President John and First Lady Abigail Adams. Like all matters of the heart, there are ups and downs when it comes to love requiring forgiveness and acceptance, whether it’s a person or a country.

Months ago, I started a list of the ways I came to love my country as a child. I recommend it as an exercise that might surprise you and might provide a way forward for how we could individually and collectively pass our shared democratic values to another generation at this pivotal time in our country’s short history. My first 12 years were the “honeymoon” stage.

In kindergarten we recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning as we put our hands over our hearts standing in front of the American flag. In music class we sang, My Country Tis of Thee and America the Beautiful. Long before I heard Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land in college coffee houses, I knew Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”.

I know that Guthrie’s song is offensive to some people. He wrote it to protest “God Bless America”, because he thought the song was too sentimental and ignored the struggles of working-class Americans during the Depression. Others, including some Native Americans, think the song is a song of colonization. I understand that and thank God we have the right to free speech in this country which allows us to refuse to say the pledge or sing songs that don’t capture our lived experience or the experiences of our ancestors.

It’s lyrics speak to my own experience of learning to love my country first-hand, traveling the “blue highways” and turnpikes with my family before there were interstates, air conditioners, fast food or swimming pools.

Every year my dad stood in the intersection of U.S. Highways 218 and 34 at 6 o’clock in the morning two blocks from our home in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa to flip a coin. If it was heads, we’d drive East. If it was tails, we’d go West.

Highway 218, originally built as a military road, is now The Avenue of the Saints connecting St. Paul to St. Louis. Highway 34, started in the Chicago suburbs and ended at Loveland, Colorado near the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.

We watched the coin-flip from the car never wondering why we always had the right clothes no matter the direction. By high school graduation I’d visited most of the lower 48 states.

When I was four years old, I remember eating a beignet covered in powdered sugar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The next year I climbed around an ancient Indian village at Mesa Verde in Colorado. When I was 8, I saw Music Man, my first Broadway show. In 1960 my brother had his picture taken with Wilie Mays at the newly opened Candlestick Park in San Francisco after we picked up huge pinecones in the Redwood Forests. I drank from a “whites only” water fountain at a gas station in Kentucky on our way to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

We drove 500-mile days and stayed at the kind of motels that would never be franchised. (My mother checked for bedbugs.) Because we rose early and drove late, “Vacancy” was one of the first 3-syllable words I recognized. “No baconcy” I would say regretfully as we passed another neon sign. To save money, we ate a lot of bologna sandwiches at roadside picnic tables.

Everywhere we went people looked different, spoke differently, dressed differently and sometimes thought differently. I learned that lots of people live in geographies very different from Iowa, which was all right angles, planted in rows of field corn and soybeans.

Those trips were the best gift my parents could have given me. When I hear the Woody Guthrie song, I don’t think of “the land” in terms of the small farms my grandparents owned in Iowa and Missouri. I’ve always thought of our “land” as our whole country, “from California to the New York island”, all those states whose capitols I had to learn, those mountains we crossed, and all those battlefields we visited.

As we approach our country’s 250th birthday, I wonder if we traveled because my parents wanted to show us what my father fought for in World War II. On our vacations we visited his Navy buddies. Sneed was a tobacco farmer in Virginia. Darst’s grandfather’s name was written on the walls of the Alamo, Falk was a Jewish lawyer practicing in Philadelphia.

I’m sure it was also because my parents shared an interest in American history and celebrated that by collecting 1840’s-era antique glass. My dad collected hand-blown whiskey flasks that commemorated American heroes and symbols like American eagles. My mom collected glass cup plates made in Sandwich, Massachusetts. These small glass “coasters” protected tablecloths but also showed a woman’s patriotism or political persuasion. The small plates commemorated events like the Battle of Bunker Hill and mid 1800’s political slogans. During our travels we sought out antique shops, treasure troves of American history.

My mom read library books aloud about the places we visited. On long driving days, we learned about the Comstock Lode, the discovery of silver in Virginia City, Nevada. (Remember Bonanza?) We learned about Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys and their role in the Revolution.

By the time I was in 5^th grade, I had walked the Freedom Trail in Boston and could recite the opening of Longfellow’s “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” from memory. (My brother had to learn it for 8^th grade English class or miss going to his first Hawkeye football game.)

It’s possible my parents wanted us to have choices when it came time to leave home. Later, the choices I made as a young adult took me far away and back home again, an Iowan and American by birth and by choice.

Family vacations only lasted a week, so my community also helped kindle my love of country. I could travel anywhere in the world with my public library card. I spent most of my time during summers at the public swimming pool where I took Red Cross swimming lessons free and the public library where I could check out as many free books as I could fit in my bike baskets. I understood the power of the word “public”.

When I was in 2^nd grade, I became a Brownie Scout, flew up to Girl Scouts and became a Curved Bar scout in 8^th grade. At scout camp I learned how to take care of our flag. The badges I earned helped me to learn about other cultures, become a steward of the land, and practice being a “good citizen”.

My mom belonged to the League of Women Voters, a bi-partisan group that encouraged people to vote. My family discussed politics at the dinner table. When I was six, my older brother got to visit a session of Congress where he spotted Senator Kennedy. What I remember about Washington is losing my first tooth while eating an ice cream bar in front of the Museum of American History, a block from what 50 years later became my office at USAID and a block from USDA which Tom led for 12 years.

In 5^th grade, in my public school named for Abraham Lincoln, I finally got to study American history. My favorite teacher, Janet Wilson, introduced us to essay tests, which gave me the chance to explain the facts I’d learned in the context of the historic places I’d visited. I wasn’t just reading about a bunch of dead people in my textbook and the Landmark books I loved. I had watched re-enactments of our founders making decisions in Williamsburg.

So, in fifth grade I was ready for the next step--political activism. I campaigned for JFK and LBJ, turning my blue Schwinn bicycle into a moving yard sign. When my classmate, Bobby Lofgren, ripped my Kennedy sign off my bike, I slapped him. He remembered it when I called him for a political contribution 35 years later.

My brother delivered the Des Moines Register and Tribune, which appeared on our kitchen table every morning. I started reading the comics, then graduated to the front page. I didn’t want to deliver the newspaper; I wanted to write for one. I still have copies of the mimeographed paper I helped produce in the room where years later I taught journalism and the first amendment to another generation.

This week I’ll start another list exploring how in high school, in college and beyond, I began to question the heroes, (all men), the media, the history books, and began to see my country with a broader, more complex perspective. For now, I’m grateful for parents who shared their love of country and for a community that invested in the public resources that helped me begin to understand my rights and responsibilities as a citizen. God Bless America.

For three days last week I heard thousands of words. We traveled to Chicago for a reunion of Obama campaign organizers, donors, policy makers, cabinet members, extended family and friends in advance of the dedication on Thursday and public opening on Friday of the Obama Presidential Center. I was overwhelmed with jubilant language, spoken and sung, laughed, shouted and whispered.

But for me, one word sums up the power of the Obama legacy: WE.

The word was there just above me etched into granite, part of a speech President Obama made in 2015 marking the 50^th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches.

“You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘we’. ‘We the people.’ ‘We shall overcome.’ ‘Yes we can’. That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”

It seemed appropriate that the weather, which no one controls no matter how powerful, brought disruptive storms and tornados to the Chicago area on Wednesday. Some guests had to shelter in place during their preview of the museum, and our reception with the President and First Lady had to be rescheduled.

But, on Thursday, Dedication Day, as the Obama family and the former Presidents and First Ladies took the stage, so did the sun. Chicago native, Jennifer Hudson, sang the Star Spangled Banner. Bono serenaded Michelle Obama singing “Michelle, my belle.” Family friend and early supporter John Legend played a piano tribute. Springsteen belted out “Land of Hope and Dreams”. Children sang and played their guitars. Common rapped. Marc Anthony got us all on our feet dancing to “Vivir mi Vida”, and we all sang along with Stevie Wonder who ended with Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

I told people before we left for Chicago that I was going to Chicago to find Hope. And I think we all found it in the speeches of Michelle and Barack Obama, in the conversations we had with long-time friends and political and policy colleagues, in the energy and industry that Chicago exudes as it goes about the work of daily life, situated on the shores of the largest freshwater lake in our country, which connects us commercially to the rest of the world.

The night we arrived we watched the “L” clunking above “The Loop” as we cut into steaks, a tribute to the stockyards that made Chicago famous and brought wealth to the Midwest. Families gathered on a chilly evening, colleagues met up after work, visitors from across the country and around the world chattered as the waitstaff, speaking in accented English, plated our food.

Even the cabbies and the Uber drivers had their say. The Nigerian-born cab driver, who delivered us to the dedication on Thursday said he would do his best to get us there. He said he was so happy that we were doing such a good thing by coming to open the Obama Center. He had immigrated to this country years ago. He didn’t think he would stay, but he did. He was a teacher in Nigeria specializing in teaching hearing-impaired children. Before he came to Chicago, he worked at Gallaudet University, the premier school for the hearing-impaired in Washington DC.

The Uber driver who picked us up after the ceremony had a different take. He asked if we knew why it was called the Windy City, then laughed and said, “It’s because of all the politicians.” He grew up in a union family of Democrats, but “Democrats have become socialists and communists,” he said. After mentioning that he’s a life-time member of a major union, Tom asked him what advice he’d give Democrats. “Quit talking about who uses what bathrooms and who can play women’s sports,” the guy shot back.

Earlier a salesperson was curious to know what we were doing in Chicago, and when we told her, she wanted our opinion of all the top-of-the-ticket candidates in Iowa that she’s been following. “Only in Chicago can you have a political conversation like this outside the changing room of a clothing store! We are all like-minded politically here,” she explained. I’m not so sure about that.

With their daughters beside them and the Clintons, Bidens, and Bushes behind them, The First Lady and President Obama spoke. We listened from in front of the podium, from the great lawn outside, and on television and on social media around the world.

Michelle Obama told us that the Obama Center was created as a “beacon of hope, a monument to the unshakeable values, the ones my husband has exemplified his entire life, equality, empathy, honesty, inclusion, fairness.” But, she says, these are not qualities unique to Barack Obama. WE must remember that they are “the same ones that your husbands and wives, your parents and children, your friends and neighbors exhibit and pass on. Every single day millions of people in this country wake up doing their very best to live decent and purposeful lives.”

She acknowledges that we often fall short, but “we know selflessness from greed, righteousness from injustice. We understand that we all rise and fall together, that every last one of us is an invaluable contributor to the greatness of America…That’s where the truth lies, not in grabbing as much as we can get for ourselves or knocking folks down to prop ourselves up, but in the overwhelming goodness, the relentless striving, the quiet dignity that is inside all of us.”

Speaking about the contributions made by immigrants she said, “And no one, and I mean no one, has the right to sit in judgement of who’s American enough.” For me that was a wow moment.

When people ask me who is going to come to save us from the turmoil that has become our daily lives, I always say that no one will ride in on a white horse. We each must work in our own sphere of influence. Michelle Obama said it so much more forcefully.

“We simply don’t have the luxury or time to be cynical or complacent, to wring our hands in despair, to wait for someone else to fix the problem. Y’all, hope is all we have, because hope is the essential spark that lights the fire of change, but hope is a choice. Whether or not we use our voices to speak up is a choice. Voting is a choice. Being a decent human being is a choice. Believing that we still hold the power to build a country that reflects us all is a choice.”

Her husband spoke, too—eloquently defining the WE that glints above us in the solstice sunlight. “We start thinking that appeals to democracy and civic participation are corny and old-fashioned and boring and naïve, that the very idea of working on behalf of the common good is a sucker’s bet and that in order for us to win, somebody has to lose…When we lose faith in each other, when we stop believing that voting matters, that citizenship matters, that our collective voices matter, that how we treat each other no longer matters, and we give away our power to decide our own futures, we open the door to the most ruthless or the most careless or the most fearful among us, who see some groups and some people as more equal than others and see government as nothing more than a way to divvy up the spoils and punish enemies and keep those who are different in their place.”

Their words were personal, honed from experience, spoken in a neighborhood dear to them, surrounded by people who care for them. But if I can only take one word home with me, one to motivate me, one to brandish and to share, it is WE.

I hope you all get a chance to visit the Obama Center. The Museum itself celebrates the policy work of the Obama Administration which Tom was so proud to be part of. Exhibits acknowledge the first family’s celebratory opening of the White House to all Americans, their diplomatic trips and diplomacy at home. It creates the historic context for understanding their commitment to human and civil rights. It points out mistakes made and lessons learned. Visitors will leave with a sense of one American family who opened their hearts and minds to us. Beyond the museum the center includes a branch of the Chicago Public Library, (Yea!), a fitness center, parks, gardens, a playground and the HQ of the Obama Foundation.

Recalling the words that we can read atop the museum, the Obama Center is an architecturally majestic call to action. You can’t leave without asking yourself, “What am I willing to do for my neighbor, for my community, for my country? What am I willing to do to get to WE?

LAGNIAPPE

The word Lagniappe, pronounced LAN-yap, means “a little something extra”. It’s a small gift, often given by a store owner to a customer, like a baker’s dozen at the bagel shop. I first became aware of the word at a small gift shop called Lagniappe in Valley Junction, West Des Moines.

It was my go-to place for interesting gifts for friends, but I also loved it, because nestled in the bottom of the bag, wrapped in tissue was always a small gift for me, a tangible thank-you note.

In my hometown, Max and Clementine Beavers owned a small grocery about a block from our home on Main Street. When our son Jess came with me to buy groceries, Howie Messer, their butcher, always handed him a “little smokie” after he’d filled my order.

In upscale restaurants sometimes the chef sends out a “taste” of something you didn’t order, an hors d’oeuvres or an after-dinner treat.

At Terrace Hill, the Iowa Governor’s Mansion, we used to leave small hand-painted china hearts beside each place setting for guests who came to Victorian teas.

One of my favorite Mark Twain books is Life on the Mississippi. I had forgotten until I checked my old Webster’s dictionary, and then my Merriam Webster online, that Mark Twain refers to “lagniappes” in his book published in 1883. “We picked up one excellent word, a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word—lagniappe… It is Spanish—so they said.”

The entry in Websters compliments Twain saying he ‘encapsulates the history of lagniappe quite nicely. English speakers learned the word from French speaking Louisianians, but they in turn had adapted it from the American Spanish word la napa which comes from Quechua, the official language of the Incas of the Andes. Twain said that New Orleanians completed shop transactions by saying, “Give me something for lagniappe,” to which the shopkeeper would respond with “a bit of liquoirce-root, a cheap cigar or a spool of thread.”

Today I’m adding an occasional feature to my Substack, Common Ground, which appears weekly on Wednesdays, a “lagniappe” to thank you for your faithful readership. Sometimes there are small stories I want to share, song lyrics, a poem, a photo, a memory that won’t take much of my time or yours. You might find them attached at the end, as a stand-alone or if they’re short enough in “notes”.

My first lagniappe is a story about our six-year old granddaughter, Amelia, who lives next door. Her family has always referred to her as “boss baby.” She has a 16 year-old brother and an 11 year-old sister. She seems undaunted by the age, size and talents of her parents and siblings. She likes to be in charge.

She is a self-proclaimed artist and spends a lot of time in our “art room” drawing, painting, and sculpting. When I make occasional suggestions, her response is often, “Gramma Christie, I have a vision. Don’t mess with my vision.” My job is to wash paintbrushes, find more tape, and deliver snacks.

Last week, it was her mother’s birthday. Amelia had created a special card and present, but she also wanted to plan the usual party, which includes gathering extended family. Her mom said she didn’t want a party. Instead, her parents decided they’d go for pizza as a family-- 6:00 p.m. I said I’d leave a chocolate cake on their counter to enjoy when they got home. Amelia continued to talk about “the party”, but no one listened.

The morning of Kate’s birthday, I got a call from Amelia. Usually when she calls, she’s sitting next to her dad, so when she said, “The party’s from 5:00-6:00 at the pool,” I thought there must be a change of plans. I said we’d be there.

When we arrived at the neighborhood pool just up the road at 5:00 p.m. sharp, we only saw Jess’s truck.

“Where’s the party?” I asked Amelia as she climbed out of the pool.

“Didn’t my dad tell you, the party is tomorrow instead, “ she said. Her dad appeared rolling his eyes. “There is no party, there never was a party,” he explained. He told us she’d also called her Cedar Rapids grandparents to invite them. They had arrived earlier and were now headed back to Cedar Rapids wondering why, like us, they hadn’t questioned taking orders from a 6 year-old.

Amelia had also called her aunt Christina in Urbandale who was making plans to celebrate her husband’s birthday with a steak dinner that evening. She emailed Kate to say that maybe they could rearrange their plans and get to the birthday party by 5:00! That’s how Amelia’s mom found out that her daughter had single-handedly organized a “surprise” party that surprised us all. We were all left shaking our heads. Her granddad and I can both imagine her RUNNING something someday or running FOR something. Oh, my!

“Everyday people can be powerful advocates,” says Dr. Susan Roberts-Dobie, Professor of Public Health and Education at the University of Northern Iowa. I called Susan after I wrote about my own hairdresser, Kate Ahnen, a cancer survivor who educates about the disease and walks to raise money for research and advocacy.

From 2009-2011 Professor Dobie led a research program in Iowa called Speak UP! using hair stylists to deliver health messages related to reducing unintended pregnancy to female clients in the 18-30-year range. At the time I was Executive Director of the Iowa Initiative, a non-profit organization funded by the Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation created to research how best to acquaint young women with recently developed long-acting reversible contraceptive devices (LARC’s) to bring down the numbers of unintended pregnancies among this age group, which at the time was over 50%.

I had no experience in health care education, but I took the job because I’m a teacher who wants young adults, both young men and women, to be able to continue their educations past high school and make educated choices about when to have their children.

In that capacity, I connected with a network of Iowa healthcare professionals at 18 maternal and reproductive healthcare clinics around the state and health care researchers at the University of Iowa and UNI who were all helping to find the best ways to disseminate information about the new long-acting products which the Buffett Foundation was making available at no or low-cost. The collaborative work we did gave me the opportunity to work with many of Iowa’s leaders in women’s healthcare. I was especially interested in how we could reach young adults in our smallest communities.

Professor Dobie got the idea for Speak UP! from CUT IT OUT, a model she’d been teaching about in her classes for years. CUT IT OUT started in Mississippi and Alabama and was sponsored by beauty-product giant, Clairol. It still empowers licensed beauty professionals, students and community allies to recognize the signs of domestic abuse and support survivors.

Professor Dobie says stylists can see things other people can’t see, like hair pulled out and bruises. Also, abusers were unlikely to follow a woman into a salon, so it became the perfect place to educate women about safety options.

Illinois and Tennessee have passed state legislation requiring licensed beauty professionals to complete up to one hour of anti-domestic violence training at no cost. Now U.S. Senators Tammy Duckworth and Marsha Blackburn have introduced federal bipartisan legislation, The SALONS ACT, that incentivizes domestic violence awareness training for cosmetologists and beauty professionals. Their bill is still pending in committee.

In 2009 Susan Dobie knew the success of CUT IT OUT and used it as a model for her Speak UP! research. She also knew that long term research showed that barbers delivering information about blood pressure reduced the numbers of heart attacks.

“When you use lay health educators as a way to deliver health education to an audience that we don’t have access to, it’s highly cost-effective. It also uses your time well. You are basically training the trainer. It’s a way to use a lay educator to reach communities where they live, have ties and are trusted,” says Susan.

Their follow up after the 3-year Buffett research program ended, showed that 34% of the stylists were still doing unintended pregnancy education without any support.

Susan is surprised at how little research in this area is being done now. She thinks that COVID interrupted a lot of work that was never completed. I commend her for her commitment to women’s health and her willingness to try research that was unconventional.

I visited some of the 93 salons in Iowa participating in the research at the time. During those visits I began to understand the power of touch to create trust, the power of good listening skills and the power of the informal chats that occur so often in beauty salons.

Another experience this year led me to better understand the power of touch, specifically the hairdresser’s touch. My college friend Elaine Weiss came to Iowa State University in March to give a lecture on her newest book, Spell Freedom, The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement. I wasn’t in the state when she had come to the Catt Center at ISU a few years earlier to talk about the role of Iowa’s Carrie Chapman Catt in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and her book called The Women’s Hour.

Elaine told her Ames audience that the book focuses on three women and one man who influenced the Civil Rights Movement who didn’t make it into history books. The messages delivered by Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, John Lewis and Thurgood Marshall would not have spread and become action—registering to vote, becoming informed voters-- had it not been for women like Septima Clark, an informal educator who recruited everyday women to help her teach African Americans to read so they could vote.

One of her recruits and one of the “stars” of the Civils Rights Movement was Bernice Violante Robinson who ran the Glamour Beauty Box salon in Charleston, South Carolina. She didn’t think she was qualified to teach civics and reading. She only had a high school education, she told Septima Clark. Mrs. Clark insisted that she didn’t want a certified teacher to open the school on John’s Island, South Carolina. She wanted someone who would not be considered “highfalutin” who would not be condescending to illiterate adults.

Her first school was held at night in the back of an African American grocery store, the least likely place for white people to suspect customers might be going to attend literacy classes. Elaine writes: “Robinson’s experience as a beautician outweighed her lack of teaching expertise. Beyond her skill with scissors and combs, a beautician needs to be a good listener, lending a sympathetic ear to her clients’ personal stories confided from the chair. At her Beauty Box salon, Robinson had created a safe supportive space for women to talk and vent; she would need to provide a similar haven for the Johns Island class…Beauticians like Robinson enjoyed the trust and respect of their communities and as an independent business woman with a loyal Black clientele, Robinson would not be subject to economic reprisals from white employers or patrons. She also had the kind of bubbly personality, sense of humor, and can-do attitude needed to steer around the inevitable bumps in the road. As an unconventional choice for an unusual project, Robinson was ideal.”

During the years of the Movement, Bernice traveled all over the south teaching and training others to open underground schools. “Robinson quickly established citizenship classes in Knoxville and another in nearby Oak Ridge. She continued her projects with beauticians many of whom were teaching citizenship classes while also funding and staffing the Tent City health clinic in Fayette County where people who had tried to register were still living as refugees.”

Robinson continued to travel the South educating other educators to teach literacy, handwriting and civics classes. One of her students at a SMCC field organizers training in voter education and registration tactics was a young man, Robert Moses, a Harvard graduate who became one of the many well-known male civil rights leaders that Robinson “educated” about the power of grassroots organizing in small citizenship schools.

When Robinson began to recruit her clients to join the NAACP, they hesitated because white leaders could get access to lists of members and make sure they lost their jobs or their homes. So, Robinson let them use the address of her salon as their mailing address, a place where they could receive mail unnoticed.

Until I read this book I had never heard of Septima Clark although she has been honored by President Jimmy Carter who called her the “Mother of the Movement” and you can find her in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History. Bernice Robinson is there, too.

Writer Elaine Weiss, like these women, follows in their footsteps by bringing them to light for those of us who grew up finding few women mentioned in our history books, certainly fewer African American women.

Hair stylist Bernice Robinson is one of the unsung heroes of the Civil Rights movement. The Movement could not have been a success without her willingness to take that first step, her ability to create and adapt train-the-trainer methods to her audiences, her ability to travel and educate virtually unseen.

The unseen, under-the-radar folks in our country are often the most powerful people in any movement, supporting any cause. We need to seek them out, lift them up, count on them for results.

I love taking walks in North Denver neighborhoods, with dogs, with children or by myself, any time of day, any season. The houses are eclectic: a multi-colored Victorian next to a bungalow, next to a two-bedroom brick beside a recently built minimalist two-story duplex. But what makes the neighborhoods “neighborly” is the right-of-ways, officially called tree lawns or ROWs by the city of Denver. Let me tell you about my family’s right-of-way.

For the past 20 years our son and daughter-in law have lived in various Northwest Denver neighborhoods. For a few years before and after they met, they rented, then bought their first home in the town of Mountain View, population 500ish. A hundred years ago that home was a farmhouse. They were neighbors to the town’s tiny police station and playground. The mayor lived in a modest house across the street. Their neighbor Kathleen turned the stumps of two large trees in her right-of-way into gnome houses. Our grandson loved them. With suggestions from Kathleen, Doug and Janet planted perennials in their right-of-way and vegetables in their front yard.

This was all new to me. Once, on Main Street in Mt. Pleasant, a woman planted a vegetable garden in her right-of-way. I’d never seen it before, and I haven’t seen it since. Now, you must get a permit to plant anything in what is called “parking”. It seems the City of Des Moines just revised their code to allow more planting options in what they call “border areas”. I haven’t seen any veggies growing in “border areas” yet, but I’m going to investigate.

During the pandemic, Doug and Janet bought a Victorian home in the Witter-Cofield Historic District near the Broncos football stadium. They situated their picnic table in their right-of-way, hung a swing for their daughter Ana from a maple, and planted a small vegetable garden. The houses in their neighborhood are close to one another, the yards small, sometime steep. This seemed like such a good use of unused space. What I didn’t realize at first was how these spaces seem to connect people in these very walkable, multi-ethnic, family-oriented neighborhoods.

Last fall, I discovered a fairy garden sure to enchant children along a neighborhood sidewalk and in the next block a “little library” filled with dog treats and complimentary “dog-poop” bags. I noticed lots of raised beds in the right of ways (some with flowers, some with vegetables) porch chairs and benches that crossed sidewalks from front porches extending the front yard into the right-of-way.

DENVER PROPERTY OWNERS MUST MAINTAIN THEIR ROWS

I found out that in Denver, property owners are generally responsible for maintaining the public right-of-ways (ROW’s) adjacent to their property. The city owns the right-of-way because it has utilities located there, but the homeowner shares responsibility for its upkeep. You must walk the neighborhoods to understand just what that public-private partnership means.

Many property owners take the responsibility seriously, and I don’t mean just pruning their trees and making sure their plants don’t obscure the view of drivers. Every family or property owner interprets the responsibility differently. Some fill the area with rocks, other turn them into rock gardens filled with succulents which don’t require much water. There’s not a lot of fertile soil in Denver or water for green lawns. Many families grow extensive vegetable gardens, perennials or fill containers with annuals. As a walker I feel like I get to know the people living here even if I haven’t met them. But I do meet many of them, because to maintain your right-of-way, you must` work outside. Plus, it’s a city. Because Denver boasts 300 plus days of sun, so people spend a lot of time enjoying the outdoors and entertaining on porches and at what I call informal side-yard “story-circles”.

MY FAMILY’S ROW PICNIC TABLE WELCOMES GUESTS

Last week I was pulling weeds in my family’s backyard garden when I heard laughter on the other side of the bushes. I peeked through and saw a mother and her daughter taking a break at the picnic table and enjoying the swing. I went to say hello. “Penny and I like to stop every day for a swing.” They’d met Ana swinging one day, and she let Penny take a turn.

Early next morning, on a walk I spotted a woman about my age digging in the front yard of a house set back from the sidewalk. I stopped to admire her work ,and we struck up a conversation. For the past 18 years Karen has worked on her family’s farm near Fountain in southern Colorado. She has just retired from farming and is spending more time in her remote cabin in the nearby Rockies. Before that, she worked as a doctor in Ethiopia for 17 years. She has come to Denver to help her friend, a former state senator who owns the historic home on the corner and the casita (guest house) where she is digging. With age, it’s become more difficult for the owners to maintain a big garden, so Karen plans to come once a week all summer to help. I admire the black soil. “They’ve been putting compost on it for 20 years,” she explains.

When I walk past again with our granddaughter a few days later, we meet Martha, one of the owners. She tells Ana to go check out the strawberries to see if any are ripe. Five-year-old Ana tells us that the house across the street belongs to “Jonathan”. “Do you know Jonathan?” asks Martha.

I assure her I’ve known Jonathan since he was five years old. He grew up in our small Iowa town with our son Doug, Ana’s dad. They both ended up in Denver. Jonathan is like an uncle to Ana and her brother Cassin. I’d forgotten that Jonathan still owns this small brick house even though he’s moved to another neighborhood. Jonathan was Martha’s neighbor during his first years in Denver. Small world.

We’re flying back to Iowa in a few hours , but I assure Martha that I’ll stop and sit on her porch next time I’m here.

On walks, I carry my phone to listen to audio books, but in Denver, I can’t help snapping photos of creative right-of-ways and extended front yards in so many different styles depending on tastes, resources, and lifestyles of the gardeners. Why does this matter? Why isn’t there more of this where I live?

Because it seems that planting your right-of-way and being responsible for the upkeep creates community, brings people out of their homes away from their screens to grow, to organize, to plant, to trim, to arrange and rearrange, and to visit with their neighbors. As I write, Doug and Janet’s newest neighbor in a small house around the corner is covering her barren yard with artificial turf, lining the edges with white urns filled with red flowers. She’s set up a round table with an umbrella in her front yard to rest before returning to lay a path. She calls to me as I heave a tennis ball for black lab, Nattie, to retrieve. I ask her name and welcome her to the neighborhood.

CORNERS ARE “LAGNIAPPES” FOR DENVER NEIGHBORHOODS

One of my favorite parts of the ROW tradition is the special attention homeowners pay to their corners. They are stewards of land they do not own. The French word for a “little extra gift” is “lagniappe”. The corner gardens are “lagniappes” for the neighborhood. Some corners are simple, and some people go all-out. My family lives on a corner with a large, sprout-producing box elder tree. When they moved in, our grandson Cassin and I started working together to tame the sprouts, deter the weeds, and make sense of the plant hodge-podge. We also discovered bright blue tiles embedded here and there among the weeds.

Our corner is a work in progress. A yard sign planted there highlights their dual language elementary school, Trevista. I’m reading a book on the porch when two women, two dogs and a little girl stop to ask if we have a child at Trevista. “Yes, grandchildren,” I reply. It turns out Frankie, like Ana, is also a kindergartner there.

In my walks around the neighborhood, as I read on the porch or work in the garden, I am surrounded by a community of flowers, food, languages and cultures. The vibe gives me hope.

The “bully pulpit” with the “barber chair.”

The first time oncologist Susan Beck had to tell my hairdresser, Kate Ahnen, that she had breast cancer 25 years ago, Kate took the necessary steps to recovery- a lumpectomy and radiation. She marvels at the compassion Dr. Beck showed her during that tough conversation. In remission, Kate decided to walk in her first local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and she’s been walking to support cancer research ever since. She’s found a way to combine her job as a hairdresser with her cancer activism. In the process she’s educated many clients, including me.

She’s found a “bully pulpit” with the “barber chair” in her one-person salon, where she has a captive audience for an hour every month. Healthcare research has shown that the “laying on of hands” while we get our hair cut, colored, or styled creates an intimacy that allows us to confide and trust the person shampooing, snipping or blow-drying that differs from our relationship with other service providers and casual friends. Most important Kate, and her fellow barbers and hairdressers are good listeners.

Cancer does not distinguish between Democrats and Republicans, white people or people of color, old or young. Prostate cancer comes for men. (They talk. Kate listens.) Breast cancer comes for men and women both. All the cancers steal our friends, our siblings, our parents, often before they have time to know our children or grow old gracefully.

I should know. In May of 1968, I lost my mom to breast cancer. For two years, as I was becoming a young woman, I watched my mother lose one breast, then the other, her uterus, her lungs, her life. Cancer also took my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law in their early 50’s, later in his life my dad, and then it started on my friends.

Because of research which drove early detection and innovative treatments, many of them, like Kate, survived. Lobbying efforts across party lines meant insurance covered more mammograms, information reached more Americans at risk for the disease, and treatment improved. “Look how far we’ve come!” is Kate’s mantra.

I sold daffodils for the American Cancer Society. I got yearly mammograms, sometimes walked in the October Komen Race for the Cure and contributed to cancer memorials instead of flowers. Small stuff.

The Cancer Jar

During the pandemic, I had to find a single practitioner to cut my hair. A friend steered both Tom and me to Kate, who is part of a hive of other hairdressers at The Studios in Urbandale, each operating independently. Just outside her salon only big enough for two, is her “bake sale”: cookies, small bags of chips, a book written by a survivor friend. If you want something, you leave money in the jar. There’s another jar in First Street Antiques, her mom’s shop in Greenfield. Friends, colleagues and clients donate jewelry and vintage stuff culled from closets, to sell there. The money goes in the cancer jar, sometimes more than $400 a month between the two jars. Her clients also make generous pledges for the big 3-day, 60-mile Komen walk she now participates in every year with family and friends in cities around the country.

Her fundraising efforts for cancer research began with the local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 15-20 years ago in Des Moines. At the time, the annual October event was a unique way to raise money for a healthcare issue. Now there’s a walk to support healthcare research every weekend.

Going Flat

Last week Kate and I met early one morning to walk the Clive Greenbelt Trail near her salon so she could get in some training and talk to me about her journey. I was sitting in her chair that day in January 2025 when her cell phone rang. Dr. Beck’s office was calling to give her unwelcome tests results. She had breast cancer again, not a recurrence, something new. She needed to come in to talk to the doctor about treatment.

She couldn’t have radiation again, so she decided to get a double mastectomy. She calls it “going flat”, more officially “aesthetic flat closure”. Now there’s an international “Going Flat Day” October 7^th, to call attention to the options that cancer patients and survivors have. Celebrity marathoner Louise Bernadette Butcher ran a marathon six weeks post-surgery and then ran the London Marathon topless to raise support for breast cancer education.

On our walk we talked about the merging of her job, her volunteerism, her religion, and her ability to find common ground with the people in her chair, who do not always agree with her politics. For me, she is the perfect example of the everyday activist that I like to highlight in this column: people who fight for democracy by listening, supporting civility and decency and like Kate, uniting for a cause we can’t tackle alone.

It’s big stuff, this optimism, this activism that drives her to train to walk 60 miles in 3 days. She fits the training in, often on weekends, sometimes before or after work, weaving it into family relationships and friendships. It’s also part of her ongoing commitment to her own health.

“Look how far we’ve come!”

She repeats, “Look how far we’ve come! “ She cites an example, grassroots lobbying in Iowa, around mammograms. “Look again at the letter you received last week about your mammogram,” she says. “By law, it must tell you the fibrous density of your breasts so you can seek additional screenings if you need to. That sentence in the letter is a successful lobbying effort by a few women here in Iowa.”

Last night she listened to a podcast about a clinical trial that will help make advances in curing HER2 cancer which “is taking our young people,” says Kate. She continues to learn the latest innovations so she can share it with people sitting in her chair. At one time she had eight clients fighting cancer. She says she’s glad there are people so smart that they can conduct the research that saves lives. She sees them as heroes. In my book, she’s also a hero.

We reach the turnaround point at a memorial bench with a pink ribbon and a name: Lori Bonacci Reames. 1957-2008. “Ten years ago, when I starting training for the 3-day walk I walked by this bench and I thought, ‘This is why I do this.’ I mean someone lost her life, right?”

So, we talk about the walks she’s been doing for the past 20 years—first the Komen walks in Des Moines that brought 10,000 people together locally to walk for cancer. Once she was the #1 fundraiser and often #2. She says she did it for the sense of community. “I wanted to belong. To belong is one of our basic human needs,”

During the 2008 recession and again during the pandemic, Komen began to re-envision their fundraising efforts. They originally sponsored 15 cities. This year there are 4: Boston, Dallas, San Diego, Tampa. Kate has walked a different city every year, for over 10 years. The first was Minneapolis which she did with her sister Kelly, who lives in Greenfield. Once during training, she’d call her saying I feel like I’m dragging a piano behind me!” Her sister was training with her friend Bridget, so raised money for her $2,300 entry too. Most of the cities attract about 800 walkers a day who stay in a host hotel, but San Diego attracts 1500 walkers because it has a camping option. There are also crew members who can no longer walk but are indispensable in handling the details of registration, hydrating and social gatherings.

Today Kate is training for Boston.

More Steps

As we walk, Kate talks about the importance of religion in her life. Ten years ago, when she started the 3-day walks, she stopped drinking on her own. She joined ALANON and the 12-step program. (More steps!) “I’m so grateful that I’m gaining that understanding of one-day-at-time. It’s a power greater than me. We humans have a history of forgetting that we can’t do it on our own.” This conversation gets us back to our cars. Together we chant the “serenity prayer” that Tom’s mother taught me, laugh when we get it right and go our separate ways.

If Kate inspires you and you’d like to contribute to her Boston walk, here’s her Facebook page. Or, if you support another cancer group, think about contributing to honor all the barbers and hairdressers out there educating their clients about important healthcare issues. But most important, when you wonder what you can do to support our democracy, think like a hairdresser. Learn to be a good listener.

The “bully pulpit” with the “barber chair.”

The first time oncologist Susan Beck had to tell my hairdresser, Kate Ahnen, that she had breast cancer 25 years ago, Kate took the necessary steps to recovery- a lumpectomy and radiation. She marvels at the compassion Dr. Beck showed her during that tough conversation. In remission, Kate decided to walk in her first local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and she’s been walking to support cancer research ever since. She’s found a way to combine her job as a hairdresser with her cancer activism. In the process she’s educated many clients, including me.

She’s found a “bully pulpit” with the “barber chair” in her one-person salon, where she has a captive audience for an hour every month. Healthcare research has shown that the “laying on of hands” while we get our hair cut, colored, or styled creates an intimacy that allows us to confide and trust the person shampooing, snipping or blow-drying that differs from our relationship with other service providers and casual friends. Most important Kate, and her fellow barbers and hairdressers are good listeners.

Cancer does not distinguish between Democrats and Republicans, white people or people of color, old or young. Prostate cancer comes for men. (They talk. Kate listens.) Breast cancer comes for men and women both. All the cancers steal our friends, our siblings, our parents, often before they have time to know our children or grow old gracefully.

I should know. In May of 1968, I lost my mom to breast cancer. For two years, as I was becoming a young woman, I watched my mother lose one breast, then the other, her uterus, her lungs, her life. Cancer also took my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law in their early 50’s, later in his life my dad, and then it started on my friends.

Because of research which drove early detection and innovative treatments, many of them, like Kate, survived. Lobbying efforts across party lines meant insurance covered more mammograms, information reached more Americans at risk for the disease, and treatment improved. “Look how far we’ve come!” is Kate’s mantra.

I sold daffodils for the American Cancer Society. I got yearly mammograms, sometimes walked in the October Komen Race for the Cure and contributed to cancer memorials instead of flowers. Small stuff.

The Cancer Jar

During the pandemic, I had to find a single practitioner to cut my hair. A friend steered both Tom and me to Kate, who is part of a hive of other hairdressers at The Studios in Urbandale, each operating independently. Just outside her salon only big enough for two, is her “bake sale”: cookies, small bags of chips, a book written by a survivor friend. If you want something, you leave money in the jar. There’s another jar in First Street Antiques, her mom’s shop in Greenfield. Friends, colleagues and clients donate jewelry and vintage stuff culled from closets, to sell there. The money goes in the cancer jar, sometimes more than $400 a month between the two jars. Her clients also make generous pledges for the big 3-day, 60-mile Komen walk she now participates in every year with family and friends in cities around the country.

Her fundraising efforts for cancer research began with the local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 15-20 years ago in Des Moines. At the time, the annual October event was a unique way to raise money for a healthcare issue. Now there’s a walk to support healthcare research every weekend.

Going Flat

Last week Kate and I met early one morning to walk the Clive Greenbelt Trail near her salon so she could get in some training and talk to me about her journey. I was sitting in her chair that day in January 2025 when her cell phone rang. Dr. Beck’s office was calling to give her unwelcome tests results. She had breast cancer again, not a recurrence, something new. She needed to come in to talk to the doctor about treatment.

She couldn’t have radiation again, so she decided to get a double mastectomy. She calls it “going flat”, more officially “aesthetic flat closure”. Now there’s an international “Going Flat Day” October 7^th, to call attention to the options that cancer patients and survivors have. Celebrity marathoner Louise Bernadette Butcher ran a marathon six weeks post-surgery and then ran the London Marathon topless to raise support for breast cancer education.

On our walk we talked about the merging of her job, her volunteerism, her religion, and her ability to find common ground with the people in her chair, who do not always agree with her politics. For me, she is the perfect example of the everyday activist that I like to highlight in this column: people who fight for democracy by listening, supporting civility and decency and like Kate, uniting for a cause we can’t tackle alone.

It’s big stuff, this optimism, this activism that drives her to train to walk 60 miles in 3 days. She fits the training in, often on weekends, sometimes before or after work, weaving it into family relationships and friendships. It’s also part of her ongoing commitment to her own health.

“Look how far we’ve come!”

She repeats, “Look how far we’ve come! “ She cites an example, grassroots lobbying in Iowa, around mammograms. “Look again at the letter you received last week about your mammogram,” she says. “By law, it must tell you the fibrous density of your breasts so you can seek additional screenings if you need to. That sentence in the letter is a successful lobbying effort by a few women here in Iowa.”

Last night she listened to a podcast about a clinical trial that will help make advances in curing HER2 cancer which “is taking our young people,” says Kate. She continues to learn the latest innovations so she can share it with people sitting in her chair. At one time she had eight clients fighting cancer. She says she’s glad there are people so smart that they can conduct the research that saves lives. She sees them as heroes. In my book, she’s also a hero.

We reach the turnaround point at a memorial bench with a pink ribbon and a name: Lori Bonacci Reames. 1957-2008. “Ten years ago, when I starting training for the 3-day walk I walked by this bench and I thought, ‘This is why I do this.’ I mean someone lost her life, right?”

So, we talk about the walks she’s been doing for the past 20 years—first the Komen walks in Des Moines that brought 10,000 people together locally to walk for cancer. Once she was the #1 fundraiser and often #2. She says she did it for the sense of community. “I wanted to belong. To belong is one of our basic human needs,”

During the 2008 recession and again during the pandemic, Komen began to re-envision their fundraising efforts. They originally sponsored 15 cities. This year there are 4: Boston, Dallas, San Diego, Tampa. Kate has walked a different city every year, for over 10 years. The first was Minneapolis which she did with her sister Kelly, who lives in Greenfield. Once during training, she’d call her saying I feel like I’m dragging a piano behind me!” Her sister was training with her friend Bridget, so raised money for her $2,300 entry too. Most of the cities attract about 800 walkers a day who stay in a host hotel, but San Diego attracts 1500 walkers because it has a camping option. There are also crew members who can no longer walk but are indispensable in handling the details of registration, hydrating and social gatherings.

Today Kate is training for Boston.

More Steps

As we walk, Kate talks about the importance of religion in her life. Ten years ago, when she started the 3-day walks, she stopped drinking on her own. She joined ALANON and the 12-step program. (More steps!) “I’m so grateful that I’m gaining that understanding of one-day-at-time. It’s a power greater than me. We humans have a history of forgetting that we can’t do it on our own.” This conversation gets us back to our cars. Together we chant the “serenity prayer” that Tom’s mother taught me, laugh when we get it right and go our separate ways.

If Kate inspires you and you’d like to contribute to her Boston walk, here’s her Facebook page. Or, if you support another cancer group, think about contributing to honor all the barbers and hairdressers out there educating their clients about important healthcare issues. But most important, when you wonder what you can do to support our democracy, think like a hairdresser. Learn to be a good listener.

BETH HOWARD BRINGS HER DOCUMENTARY TO MY HOMETOWN

Beth Howard, my Iowa Writers Collaborative (IWC) colleague, was bringing her award-winning documentary PIEIOWA, about Iowa’s culture of pie, to my hometown. I wasn’t going to miss it. Through the Mt. Pleasant grapevine, I heard that my PEO Chapter, Original A, a philanthropic education organization founded in Mt. Pleasant, had invited Beth to headline a fundraiser.

I saw the documentary last fall at the IWC weekend retreat in Okoboji, Iowa, but I wanted to see it with the people I’d grown up with, the community of women still alive who had created my idea of what it was to bake and share a good pie with the people you care about.

During the drive to Mt. Pleasant, I thought about my trip to Stover, Missouri to visit my 92-year-old grandmother one summer when I was home from college. When I arrived, she was making a cherry pie to donate to a church supper. “The older ones just give two dollars,” she explained. “Who could the older ones possibly be?” I wondered. But I took visual notes as she worked, her knuckles nearly perpendicular with arthritis.

I remember my Aunt Jessie who was still making the pumpkin pies for our Thanksgiving dinners into her 90’s. The last few years, she succumbed to buying frozen crusts. To her embarrassment, once she forgot to take out the lining before she added the filling. It’s a good thing she made two. I thought of Donna Hoaglin who used to bring gooseberry pies to potluck suppers at the rustic “country club on the river” built on stilts near the Skunk River.

I made it to Mt. Pleasant in two-and-a half hours, just in time to pick up my friend Mary, welcome the filmmaker, Beth, and slip into a pew at the Presbyterian Church beside Melinda, my best friend growing up. There were over a hundred people there. I knew them all. I also knew they’d love the documentary, and they did. It highlighted hundreds of everyday Iowans including the church ladies from Donnelson just down the road. Beth featured The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Boy columnist Chuck Offenburger who has probably tasted pie in every town in Iowa. Ottumwa native, Tom Arnold, co-star of the tv sitcom Rosanne, talked about his iconic hometown “go-to” for pie, Canteen Lunch in the Ally.

Near the back, I was able to watch the faces of the people in the crowd. Relaxed, they quietly mused, murmured and laughed. Beth captures in the film what brought me back to Iowa and what I write about—that sense of community with people who share (mostly) common values, love their neighbors, state, and country despite the political angst that has so sorely divided us in recent years. In times like these we must find some common ground, and if it’s pie, so be it.

In her cinematography Beth captures the iconic places that you’d expect to find pie in Iowa: the State Fair, our bike ride across Iowa (RAGBRAI), our ethnic community celebrations, the special restaurants that figure into our lives, and the people we identify with certain kinds of pie from our churches’ community dinners.

WE ARE A STATE OF IMMIGRANTS

There are celebration and nostalgia, but there’s another theme in the movie that serves as an important reminder: We are a state of immigrants and each group who settled in this state from the 1800’s to today has left its mark in many identifiable ways, often with food. Beth reminds us virtually and in her conversations with Iowans, that every culture has a kind of pie. PIEIOWA suggests that Italians have pizza, Latinos make tacos, and Australians craft hand pies. And sometimes in the making, these multi-cultural pies take on flavors from other cultures.

Afterwards, Beth took questions about making the movie and invited stories from the audience. Eighty-seven-year-old Marilee Donnolly, sporting an electric-yellow cap, raised her hand. “When our First Lady Christie Vilsack created a cookbook, she asked for stories about the recipe we submitted. Mine was the mincemeat pie my mother-in-law , Mom D, made.” She explained that it wasn’t listed with the deserts in the cookbook but with entrees, because it was a meat pie!

I leaned over and waved to Marilee who was sitting the next pew over. She hadn’t seen me arrive. That got a laugh.

Since we were talking mincemeat, I motioned for the microphone. I grew up in the Episcopal Church in Mt. Pleasant, and every year the ladies gathered in the church kitchen to make large quantities of mincemeat, which they stashed in jars and sold to raise money for church projects. When I was in 6^th grade I got to help. It was a rite-of-passage, being invited into a community of women cooking together. Aromas wafted from big pots: nutmeg, cinnamon, raisins, meat. I told the crowd that when we moved back to Mt. Pleasant, they no longer made mincemeat. Most people today have never tasted it. Harold and Helen Hawkins lived two doors down from us on Main Street. They were church members when I was growing up, so Helen gave me her handwritten instructions. I told the crowd I’d be happy to share the recipe.

Our filmmaker was bewildered by this talk of mincemeat! She wasn’t familiar with it and had never heard a conversation about mincemeat pie in the many venues where she’s shared her documentary.

After a few more stories we were all ready for what came next—eating pie!

The PEO’s had prepared pies galore, every kind imaginable (except mincemeat) and on close inspection they all seemed to be homemade crusts and fillings. I nabbed two pieces of cherry from server Kathy Nellor, one for me and one to take home to Tom. I complimented Betty Mullen’s church lady hat. I stopped to chat with Marilee who was eating pie with her daughter- in-law Marlene. I ate my pie with teacher friends.

Classmate Charlotte Sommerfeld Zihlman told me her home had burned, and her family had lost everything. Would I share my mincemeat recipe? I promised it to her and several others.

On the drive home my mind wandered to other pie bakers I’ve encountered. My mouth waters thinking about Bernita’s Moore’s rhubarb pie. In 1998 after a long day of campaigning, I stopped at Bernita’s farm along the Turkey River for dinner.

Her son Lennis and daughter-in-law Sandy were special friends of ours in Mt. Pleasant. Bernita fixed beef roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, Jell-o salad, homemade rolls, frozen corn from her garden, bread and butter pickles and rhubarb pie for dessert. Just for me. After months of Burger King Big Fish sandwiches, it felt like the best meal I’d ever eaten. Besides that, Bernita, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, campaigned for us around Elgin and Elkader and showed up at a Democratic meeting to vote for Tom in a straw poll during the primary.

NEVER BAKE THE PERFECT PIE

And then there was BeBe’s mythical lemon meringue pie. I met Tom’s grandmother when I first visited Pittsburgh to meet his family in the spring of 1969. Her Catholic faith was unshakeable. She said the Rosary every day, then asked God to let her die in her sleep when it was her time. She also baked pies. Lemon meringue was her specialty, but her pies were never quite right. Each time she baked, she’d point out a flaw- crust too done, filling too runny, weepy meringue. But one day, when she was 82, Tom says she admitted that she gotten it just right. She’d finally baked the perfect pie. That night her prayers were answered. In her honor, I always find some fault with my pies. I’m determined to put off baking the “perfect pie”.

Ask your friends, family and maybe someone you’d like to know better for a pie recipe. Bake a pie or buy one from one of the many specialty pie shops mentioned in Beth’s documentary or wherever you live. Here’s a link to find out where you can watch PIEIOWA, eat pie and meet Beth, who thinks that pies are for sharing and finding common ground.

This recipe was meant to make many quarts of mincemeat. Direction? “Cook over low heat until thick.” And “When baking pie, cut with orange juice or sprite.” I have never made a mincemeat pie, but the recipe is precious.

MEET THE KONIJNS

Come with me to a dairy and tulip farm in the Dutch countryside to meet three generations of the Konijn family. We’ll visit their tulip fields, meet their Holstiens, and taste their Beemster Royaal Grand Cru, Gouda-style cheese, just named the world’s best cheese at the World Championship Cheese Contest in Madison, Wisconsin.

We’re greeted by daughter-in-law Cristal in the farm shop, where a neighbor and his daughter, Gwen, help themselves to milk produced by the Konijn’s Holstiens in the barn next door. They bring their own bottle, and Gwen gets a peek at the cows after they make their purchases, including some “self-serve” cheese from a cooled vending machine that dispenses their dairy and meat products. The matriarch, Betsie Konijn, arrives to take us to the tulip fields. She’s been serving apple pie and coffee to a group of 30 bike riders passing through.

“WE’RE THE BEST”

She can’t resist bragging a bit about their first-place cheese. Every three days a truck arrives to pick up their milk and the milk of about 40 of their neighbors. Their milk is used by CONO Kassmakers whose cow’s milk cheese was praised for its “nutty flavor, butterscotch notes and firm, crystalline texture.” Excited, she raises her arms in a proud winner’s stance.

That’s then we notice the photo: President Barack Obama standing with the Konijn family in their tulip field. “That’s my boss!” Tom exclaims. He explains his job as “Minister of Agriculture” for the U.S. during the Obama and Biden administrations and wonders about the odds of us visiting the same farm the President visited in 2023. Originally our tour didn’t include this farm, only a nearby historic windmill. But our super tour guide Mareke called an audible when she found out Tom’s background. She reached out to contacts and learned about the Konijn’s farm, although she was as surprised as we were about President Obama’s visit.

When the family dog wanders in, Betsie explains that he’s named Bruce for “The Boss”, their favorite musician. Tom tells them that he and our extended family met “The Boss” after Springsteen wrapped up the presidential campaign in Des Moines in 2012. Betsie has her own story: President Obama called “The Boss” so Betsie could say hello from the tulips fields during his visit.

Betsie’s son Niek interrupts his chores to take us on a tour of the dairy barn. Three-year-old Loek, caroms around the courtyard on his foot-propelled motorcycle. Cristal returns with baby Maartje who’s awakened from her nap. I notice a John Deere implement I don’t recognize in the barnyard. Niek explains that it belongs to the man their hire to behead the tulips next week. “Why would they lop the blossoms off those beautiful tulips?” I wonder to myself. I’ll save it for the tulip fields.

Niek shows us his tightly packed fodder they grow to feed their animals. Later when we see it growing in the field, we learn that some of it is packed with nutrient-enriching herbs.

He gets busy answering Tom’s questions. They use about 60 hectares to graze their cows, “because grass grows well here in the Midlands, but it also gives good fertility to the soil for the tulip bulbs later.” They have an additional three hectares in tulips, three in potatoes and three in corn silage (a hectare is about 2.5 acres).

They have an average sized herd: 110 milk cows, 50 young stock and a few beef cows. They’ve been selling potatoes for 30 years. They also sell eggs and recently added beef products and milk. During the corona epidemic, people came from the cities to buy produce. The Konijns take advantage of the opportunity to earn an extra paycheck from their “help yourself” store.

In the milking barn, big Loek, the patriarch, is attaching the milking machine to the cows who wander in when they’re ready to be milked.

Niek says students from Iowa State University visited with their professor to learn more about their dairy and tulip operation. He shows us the ISU gift plaque. More important are the blue plates on the wall. These are awarded locally for the highest quality milk. His mom, Betsie, holds up the most recent and explains that the rest of the plates won through the generations are displayed in their home. As we leave the barn a small milk truck arrives to collect the milk.

“OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!”

Betsie loads us into her truck for the tulip fields. I am shocked to learn that the miles of rainbow-colored tulip and hyacinth fields we’ve been photographing will soon be losing their heads. That John Deere implement I noticed earlier will remove and mulch the blossoms. Then the nutrients can flow into their crop, the bulbs. Grocery store and flower shop tulips are grown in the huge greenhouses we’ve seen lining the highways. Those are flown to consumers world-wide. If you’re a tourist who misses the height of tulip season in the fields, you’ll have to visit Keukenhof Gardens where 7 million flowering bulbs are displayed for about eight weeks.

We learn from Betsie that there are 3000 varieties of tulips and that it takes up to 20 years to develop a new variety. What we didn’t learn as we passed miles of purple, violet and blue hyacinths, and variations of yellow, pink and red tulips, is the work that goes into producing them. And most startling of all that in a few days it’s “Off with their heads!”

Betsie says the fields require a lot of hard labor. They hire high school and college students to do the work of pulling the volunteer tulips, (no red tulips in the yellow rows!) and ridding the fields of diseased plants. It’s the equivalent in rural America of “walking beans,” a way for many U.S teenagers to pay for gas or college.

Betsy explains how the bulbs are planted and how they’ll soon be harvested, cleaned and boxed for their buyer.

After the deflowering in May, the bulbs will be lifted in nets from the ground in June. “We clean them. We take off the old skins and the roots. We have a machine for it we call a robot. Eight to ten people walk behind the machine sorting and cleaning off dirt and roots, what she calls “bollenpellen”.

FARMING: RISKY BUSINESS

When we return to the barns to say our goodbyes, Niek and Tom talk about the risky business of farming.

Niek is the only one of his brothers who returned to the farm after college. I will remember Niek saying that he didn’t come back for the money, for sure. He wants to be a steward of his land. He wants to feed his neighbors, but he also wants to find innovative ways to improve his operation and win more blue plates.

“We always make a joke here,” he says. “We say farmers like to work too much. If all the other people win the lottery, they will call their boss and say, ”I’m quitting.” First thing a farmer does is buy more property, buy more land, get a new tractor. Work harder!”

Tom assures him that it’s the same where we live. “Because you farmers have become so good at what you do, the rest of us no longer have to grow our own food. But you can be the best farmer and still lose it all,” he says. Farmers everywhere are at the mercy of the weather, changing markets, and the decisions of policy makers far-removed from the farm.

We leave with samples of the prize-winning cheese and the good feeling that comes with meeting like-minded people who are truly connected to the land.

Take a walk with me through the streets of Amsterdam on an early weekend morning near the Westerkerk Dutch Reformed Church along the Prinsengract Canal. The morning light catches the reflections of the step-gabled hotels, homes and storefronts that line the canal. Water gently laps against the trademark houseboats. There are 2500-3000 of these floating homes in the city.

Our hotel is a block away, and in the night I hear the muted church bells. Standing by the diminutive bronze statue of Anne Frank in the church’s courtyard, absent the traffic and visitors, I feel the bells like a heartbeat.

Anne could hear them too during the two years she and her family hid in the Secret Annex above her father’s spice business. Behind a door disguised as a bookcase she wrote daily in her now-famous red plaid diary. She died a few weeks before the Bergen-Belsen camp was liberated near the end of World

At the statue’s feet lie tulips slightly wilted overnight, no doubt left there by the thousands who visit the Anne Frank Huis each day. No matter what the hour, people from around the world —of every color, speaking every language wait hoping to get tickets which are sold out weeks in advance.

What used to be a Catholic Church is topped by a resplendent blue and gold orbed crown. After the Reformation it was relieved of its statues and stained-glass windows and organ. Today the Westerkerk’s pulpit is its most prominent feature, but the organ has returned. Now it’s more a concert venue than a church. A poster announces an upcoming Bach concert.

I have walked past the church and Anne’s hiding place multiple times over my stay and each time the school children wait to climb the steep stairs where they’ll imagine themselves sitting for hours in silence, because their lives would have depended on it. For me the self-guided tour yesterday was an emotional experience. The house is a shrine more than a museum. No photos are allowed. Teenagers whisper. Except for the diary at the end, personal items have been removed, although visitors may climb the ladder the girls used to get a glimpse of weekend skies.

I taught the play for 25 years to 13 year-olds, and coming to this house was my main reason for visiting Amsterdam. I used to turn off the lights of my classroom and ask my students to sit in silence for 10 minutes to show them what it might have been like for teenagers to sit still as the workday proceeded in the offices below.

As a language arts teacher who asked my students to keep journals, the irony of the final panel with a single quote resonates:

“My greatest wish is to be a journalist, and later on, a famous writer. We’ll have to wait and see if these grand illusions (or delusions!) will ever come true…”

I am nearly alone as I walk along the canal. Suddenly, a woman comes out her door and down the step in her green housecoat, her dog unleashed. Many of the shades are closed this morning. Usually it is easy to see inside kitchens where a bowl of apples and pears entice or a child’s thermos is left behind on a kitchen table as parents have hurried them off to school. On almost every widow sill there is a plant, a bouquet of flowers or something unique to share with passersby they will never meet.

I turn off the familiar path into a residential neighborhood where local families begin to go about their everyday lives. All residents bike. There is one bike for every citizen, about 837,000. Then add the tourists! We are all warned of the dangers of bikers, especially those on electric bikes. That is not yet a problem this morning. Every bike has a basket or plastic box up front for carrying groceries and sometimes dogs. On weekdays, stylishly dressed women load purses into the crates.

A woman parks beside her front door and removes her reusable grocery bags from a wheelbarrow like container that can hold several children and groceries.

In this neighborhood of modest homes, people my age more freely ride their bikes to do their errands before the tourists take to the streets oblivious of the local rules of the road.

What I thought were owls, hooting in the evenings turn out to be very large pigeons. I find one sitting on her nest in a small tree along the street, coo-cooing not who-whooing like the ones in our forest at home.

Tiny garbage trucks remove detritus dropped by international tourists who come to ride the canal boats, drink the beer, eat stroopwafels and takes buses to the country to see the tulips at Keukenhoff Gardens—about 40,000 visitors and 7 million flowering bulbs. But here, where people sit on their stoops, there are small personal gardens to enjoy.

It is still too early for the black coffee to go I’m searching for. I window shop instead, hard to do during the day because the narrow sidewalks can’t accommodate all the foot traffic.

Now I can see the toy store with its mouse house. Next door are the multi-colored Crocs, which have replaced wooden shoes that only farmers wear into their soggy fields. There’s the ubiquitous bike shop. I’m told a basic bike costs $400-500. (“Lock them up or they’ll be taken or tossed in the canal.”)

And right beside it is the store which I think is a candy shop until I realize the lollipop tree is filled with cannabis pops. My first day looking for a takeout coffee, I turned into a shop that smelled like college dorms in the 60’s. Cannabis is illegal in Amsterdam, but I’m told that coffee shops which offer more than coffee are accepted as a way to keep hard drugs to a minimum.

Ah, I smell coffee. I am near what was city hall centuries ago. Later it was home to Napoleon’s brother and now serves, like Blair House in the U.S., as a residence for visiting dignitaries.

By 5 o’clock this evening all the topsy-turvy chairs along the cobblestone sidewalks will be taken by people drinking beer and eating croquettes, tourists mostly. But, looking more carefully, I saw a man who lives on a houseboat enjoying the evening sun with a friend surrounded by his floating garden. A neighbor near our hotel opened his tiny garage and sat just inside with friends who had stopped with their dogs for chat and a Heineken or Amstel.

It’s a sunny but chilly morning. I’m glad I brought my insulated jacket and my sneaks. I will put at least 8 miles on them before the day ends, but for now I continue my quest to see how the citizens of Amsterdam live. I turn into the supermarket. A mother is there with two blonde girls maybe 4 and 6 helping their mother fill her basket. They disappear around a corner and the chase begins with loud giggles. I see lots of windowed boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables for easy take-out. No shopping carts, no cosmetics, beer, or pharmacies sold here.

I pass a cheese shop, with huge red wheels of Gouda. I peek in a window with fish I do not recognize, except for the marinated herring that is popular here. Yesterday our guide, Marike, stopped at an open-air stand near the church to purchase a small herring for her lunch from the shopkeeper who recognized her and knew what she wanted. She dangled the herring above her mouth, then down the hatch. “That’s how we locals eat it,” she said smacking her lips. He cut mine into chunks. It was delicious.

Later we will visit a whaling village that now specializes in smoking and exporting eels that live in fresh water where the land has been reclaimed from the sea. Now the fishermen there make more from tourism than fishing. In Amsterdam we are never far from fish and water, something unfamiliar to this Midwesterner.

I consult my map to be sure I’m headed back toward our hotel. I’m used to streets on grids sometimes I get a little lost on the various grachts and straats. Our room looks over a beautiful hidden courtyard with olive trees and tulips galore. It’s time for breakfast before we visit dairy and tulip farms.

I have passed up Swedish sweets, Italians cannolis and French baguettes, and I have yet to find Dutch pastries to match the bakeries in Iowa’s Dutch communities. But oh do I love Dutch pancakes and the grainy brown bread slathered with flavorful butter from Holland’s happy Holsteins.

Next week come with me to visit a dairy and tulip farm. We’ll meet three generations living and working outside a small rural Dutch village. We’ll also see some historic working windmills and some new ones, too.

Drake Law student Quincy Weigand went home during spring break to her family farm near Cairo, Missouri. They were lambing, and she wanted to be there to help. She grew up in 4-H, joined FFA and has shown cattle around the country. This summer she’s going home to intern with local lawyer and county prosecutor, Jordan Force, the only female lawyer in her community and one of only a few lawyers left in Shelby County, Missouri.

“I decided to go to law school specifically to serve as a rural practitioner. Where I grew up lots of counties are legal deserts with few or no attorneys. I hope to take my education and turn it into an opportunity to give back to the community that made me the person I am today,” says Quincy. Shelby County doesn’t have the funds to pay for a summer clerk, so being paid as a Vilsack Intern at Drake gives her a chance to earn enough money to pay for her living expenses during the coming school year. Last summer Quincy interned with the Farm Bureau in Des Moines, and this year served as Editor in Chief of the Drake Journal of Agricultural Law. She’s also excited that her younger sister will enter from Drake Law School and is also interested in a rural practice.

Because many small-town lawyers are retiring, and because fewer law school graduates are seeking a career in rural places, there just aren’t enough lawyers in rural Iowa and surrounding states to handle everyday legal work. City and county attorney jobs become part time or remain vacant. I became aware of the term “lawyer desert” when I was talking with lawyer friends in my hometown recently.

DRAKE’S VILSACK INTERNS TRY SMALL TOWN PRACTICES

Tom and I wanted to help find a solution, so with The World Food Prize and Drake University, we recently announced the Vilsack Interns at Drake Law School. With the same partnership, we are also created and funded the Vilsack Interns at Drake’s Darling Institute for Sustainability. “It’s a recognition that small towns need lawyers and lawyers can be leaders, catalysts for economic development in communities,” says Tom. “If law students aren’t aware of the opportunities in the food and ag space, they might be tempted to go to a big city law firm when they’re better suited to a small-town practice.”

He will be directly involved in preparing interns for a rural experience. He started his own career in a small town and led community organizations while building his practice, which involved representing farmers during the farm crisis of the 80’s. He wants to give interns a toolkit for adding value to a rural practice based on what he’s learned over the years as a lawyer and policymaker. He’s on a mission to rebuild thriving rural economies across the country, so he’ll be educating the Vilsack Interns about the climate smart agriculture programs that he developed at USDA. The programs created new funding streams for small farming operations in every state to complement the incredible growing and earning power of larger farmers who are feeding the world. He hopes to visit the communities hosting Vilsack Interns to talk about his revitalization blueprint with local leaders.

Jennifer Zwagerman, Director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake, and Laura Dufoe, Director of Career Development, are leading the intern recruitment effort. They’ve designed the internship to support students who want to clerk in rural practices, or in organizations or businesses connected to food or ag-related food policy.

Laurie explains that Drake is committed to eliminating the lawyer deserts in rural counties in Iowa and across the country. Drake has ramped up their efforts to invite rural law firms to recruit at the law school. “Everything that we hear from our real practitioners is that lawyers just out of law school will earn just as much in small communities as any Des Moines beginning attorney. Laurie says that rural lawyers state their practices are so robust, because they are sometimes serving their entire county. Recently she wrote about rural practice preparation at Drake in the March Issue of the Iowa Lawyer published by the Iowa Bar Association. “Preparing students for a rural legal practice requires more than encouraging words. It requires intentional exposure, meaningful relationships with practicing attorneys, and practical support that allows students to explore opportunities they might not otherwise consider.”

LAWYER/FARMER HELPS SOLVE LEGAL DESERTS

Kathy Law, President of the Iowa Bar Association, is also committed to encouraging more students at both the University of Iowa and Drake Law School to consider taking jobs in small communities. She, her husband Dave, and their son Jonathan farm near Churdan. Jonathan is also a lawyer in nearby Greene county seat, Jefferson. Before she went to Drake Law School in her 40’s she was a full-time farmer, driving tractors, walking beans and combining corn. Now, in addition to her private law practice with Nyemaster in Des Moines, she teaches a class at the Agricultural Law Center at Drake. Because of her own commitment to rural places, she has just finished a tour of Iowa to talk with local stakeholders in communities that are experiencing lawyer deserts. This week she’s at the state capitol lobbying to pass House File 2331 which establishes a loan repayment program and provides up to $10,000 annually for six years for attorneys who practice law in Iowa and handle indigent defense cases.

A map of Iowa shows that there are 43 counties currently considered legal deserts, which means there are fewer than one attorney for 1,000 residents. Forty-three counties currently qualify.

Some experienced lawyers want to retire, but they say their clients are like family and they can’t leave them without legal representation. Rural lawyers are willing to pay young lawyers as much as $70,000 to join their firms, salaries that are competitive with those offered by larger law firms in Des Moines. But they also worry that they’re not prepared to mentor a young lawyer in a digital world. They’re going to need help.

Kathy has also talked with community leaders in places like Creston, Marshalltown, Burlington, and Fort Dodge about the possibility of incentivizing recruits by helping to find office space, helping them find homes, or co-recruiting CPA’s to partner with beginning lawyers.

Young attorneys worry about choosing a rural practice, because they’ve been led to believe that they won’t make enough money to pay off student loans or that they’ll never be considered a good lawyer. They worry about professional and social isolation and lack of career opportunities for spouses and partners. Many aren’t sure about running a business as well as learning the law.

The Iowa Bar Association issued a report about what they discovered. Included is a list of potential solutions. Since one of the suggestions was mentorships, we’re hoping the Vilsack Internships will help fill the gap.

BELLE BABB MANSFIELD: LEGAL PIONEER

I am particularly heartened that four of our six Vilsack Interns are female law students willing to try out working in small towns to serve rural clients, or with organizations focused on rural America. They follow in the footsteps of the first woman to be admitted to the U.S. Bar in 1869. Belle Babb Mansfield studied at the desk of lawyers at the Ambler Firm in my hometown, Mt. Pleasant, before there was a law school in Iowa.

The three local lawyers who administered the oral examination, the norm at the time, deemed her to be “imminently qualified to practice law in the State of Iowa”. For that to happen, they had to change the law, since only white men were allowed to practice law in Iowa at the time. She lived in Mt. Pleasant teaching at Iowa Wesleyan College and traveling the state to speak about women’s suffrage. In 1900 she was recognized by the National Association of Women Attorneys meeting in Chicago as the first woman in the U.S. to be admitted to the Bar.

Because I grew up not knowing about her, when I was First Lady, I led a group of men and women in Mt. Pleasant in raising resources and awareness about Belle, so we could build a statue to honor her. My interest in creating the Vilsack Internships is in part because I want more young women to consider legal careers that honor Belle’s legacy of breaking barriers and choosing to live in a rural community.

Moving forward, the proceeds from Common Ground’s paying subscribers will move to an account that will help fund the Vilsack Interns at the Darling Institute for Sustainability and the Vilsack Interns at Drake Law School. Thanks for considering subscribing, but feel welcome to continue as an unpaid subscriber. I welcome you all to read and learn.