Hawkeye
Autumn has always been the season that formed some of the best memories of my youth—my favorite season in many ways. The winds would shift to a more northerly direction as flocks of geese flew south for the coming winter. The last of the corn and soybean harvests would be safely tucked away in grain elevators dotting the landscape. Fields would be left with only a dry yellow stubble where massive combines had recently pressed the black soil of what we affectionately called “The Hawkeye State.”
It was the “in between” time of year. I would bid a bittersweet goodbye to yet another summer, endure the whole back-to-school thing, and dive into a new year of both studies and daily morning Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic School. Thanksgiving was still a good way off on the calendar and the Christmas holiday seemed impossibly distant.
Iowa’s four seasons were always sharply contrasting—bounded by bright dividing lines in the weather patterns. We endured seemingly endless months of snow, ice, and wind chills that made the coats on my grandfather’s Angus cattle transform from their summer-sleek black to an almost wooly texture. Not that it did them much good when it was five degrees below zero outside, but nature tried to help out as best it could.
Then one day, usually in late March or early April, we’d get what my dad called “Chinook winds” blowing in from the western plains. I’d wake up to the sound of water dripping from icicles dangling from the eaves like glittering spears of glass and the occasional rumble of melting snow sliding off the roof. By afternoon, the temperature would be in the sixties—this after months where the thermometer rarely climbed above freezing. Soon, the first hints of green grass would poke through grayish patches of dirty snow. After so many cold months, it felt like shorts weather.
*
Much later in life, I learned that Iowa actually only rarely gets true Chinook winds. Nevertheless, we almost always would experience breezy and suddenly warmer weather this time of year. In a matter of days, the snow would be gone and spring would arrive. Gentle rain showers would fall on the increasingly green and leafy countryside between blustery days that were ideal for flying plastic and balsa wood kites Dad would buy for me at Pamida—the main discount department store in town back then, long before we’d ever heard of Walmart.
I’d stand out in the front yard of our house, jacket zipped all the way up to my chin, the hood cinched tightly around my face, holding on to a wooden spool of thin cotton string—a pint-sized Ben Franklin listening to the crisp rattle of kite wings in the chilly spring breeze.
I always insisted that Dad purchase the biggest roll of string he could find. Standing in our front yard facing west, I would keep playing it out as the kite receded further into the sky until it appeared no larger than a butterfly darting to and fro, high above the neighbor’s cattle pasture across the highway. I was determined to get that kite all the way in the air, whatever that meant.
*
Eventually, the spring winds would die down and the June bugs would come out of hiding one night, forming massive hordes that mindlessly circled the mercury vapor security light mounted atop a utility pole in our backyard. When I looked over the fence behind our house into the darkness, the hayfield beyond would be a vast carpet of fireflies—blinking pinpoints of multi-colored light that twinkled like a sea of stars.
This always heralded the arrival of summer. The air carried the faint scent of Lily of the Valley and honeysuckle—mixed with the much more pronounced odor of cow manure. Or, as my grandfather called it, “the smell of money.”
This season always felt too brief to me, for no sooner than the smoke from the last of the Independence Day fireworks cleared than the first cool, dry breeze of autumn would return. The groves of trees north and east of our house would slowly change to red, orange, and golden yellow, and the apple trees my dad had planted in the early 1970s would be heavy with their ripe bounty.
*
As autumn approached, the days began to shorten and turn chillier. The sunlight became somehow less bright, but more golden. Occasionally, the sky would be covered with a veil of low, leaden-gray clouds that were a harbinger of cold rains—and later, snow—to come. Inside, the house became a refuge of warmth and light, a mixture of smells from my mother’s “Damn Good Chili” simmering on the stove (so named by my grandmother, who was rightly proud of the recipe she’d created) and the scent of the cinnamon and vanilla candles she would leave flickering on the kitchen table.
On the last Saturday of every September, the nearby town of Centerville would host a civic homecoming of sorts, with the relatively unoriginal title of “Pancake Day.” The seat of Appanoose County, Centerville had been celebrating this since sometime in the 1950s. While other towns might have their own “pancake days,” Centerville’s was actual Pancake Day—capitalized in my mind to emphasize that it was the One True Holiday involving circles of cake batter cooked on a griddle greased with a hard-used rind of bacon fat.
It was held on the expansive city square dominated by the large stone edifice of the county courthouse in the center. At two city blocks per side, Centerville always billed its square as “The World’s Largest.” Whether that’s true, I have no idea, and frankly I don’t want to know. Some things are better left unexplored too deeply for fear you might somehow tarnish the memory.
On the courthouse lawn, there would be an enormous tent erected for the day. Inside, rows of the aforementioned gas-fired griddles were arranged upon folding tables. Staffing these griddles were various local business people and dignitaries, taking their turn with spatulas in hand, ladling out batter and flipping pancakes for all of the visitors who had arrived for the day’s festivities. The line would frequently stretch from the courthouse lawn halfway across the street to the far side of the square.
As a child, I had to have a short stack every year, even though these mass-produced breakfast treats typically had the consistency of Goodyear tire patches. Many times my mother would say, a trifle indignantly, “If you really want pancakes for breakfast, I can make them for you, you know. At least you can cut mine with a fork.”
She wasn’t wrong, but in all honesty, it was the butter and syrup I was after. The pancakes were merely the delivery vehicle. And besides, you don’t mess with tradition.
*
The rest of the day was filled with various activities: games, live bands, and contests—the biggest being the crowning of the Pancake Day Queen in the evening. The main event, though, began around 1 p.m.
The Pancake Day parade kicked off with a bang.
To my kid brain, it sounded like the dynamite Wile E. Coyote was forever using to no avail to nab the Roadrunner. But, it was probably just a starter’s pistol or a firecracker with delusions of grandeur. I remember sitting on my father’s shoulders, fingers in my ears to shield against the noise of the blast, and then watching everyone place their hands over their left breast as the color guard passed by leading the parade.
Right behind was the Centerville High School marching band. Later in my teenage years, I was promoted from parade viewer to active trumpet-playing participant in the band.
As far as marching bands go, let’s just say we were an excellent concert band—lumbering around in red and black uniforms with these enormous fuzzy black hats that made us look like escapees from Buckingham Palace. The look was completed with white bucks—white suede shoes that required their own special polish and gave the whole ensemble the air of a barbershop quartet guarding the royal family. I think perhaps we were under the impression that when the band director shouted “dress right,” we were supposed to check the flies on those heavy wool pants we were wearing.
You know, just to make sure we were, in fact, dressed right. I mean, none of us wanted to be dressed wrong . . . but in those ridiculous getups, who could tell?
Next would come an enormous array of floats, interspersed by other school marching bands from all over south-central Iowa—Pella, Oskaloosa, Davis County, and many more. Clown cars would dodge in and out, their occupants tossing candy to the kids in the crowd.
The previous year’s Pancake Day queen would be paraded by as well, sitting atop the back seat of a stylish old convertible, dressed in her crown and sash. She would wave to the crowd just the way I’d seen Queen Elizabeth II do in those news clips on TV. It all seemed so grand at the time.
Finally, a troop of horses would trot by the crowd, with the rear of the parade being brought up by a street sweeper from the Centerville Public Works department. The aroma of fresh horse droppings being swirled around on the pavement by this giant machine’s great rotating brushes and thin stream of water meant only one thing: parade’s over.
Just watch your step on the way back to the pancake tent after the parade.
Or, as they might say in London, “Mind the crap.”
*
The arrival of autumn also meant the coming of Halloween. It wasn’t the dressing up and getting free candy that was so much fun to me as were all the other activities. St. Mary’s Catholic Church would host a Halloween party every year in the church basement that included all the standards: bobbing for apples, pin the tail on the donkey, ghost stories, and the quintessential potluck that revolved around Hiland Potato Chips and homemade loose meat sandwiches.
We always called them “Maid-Rites” even though technically the only places that could bill them as such were part of a regional chain of restaurants that had trademarked the name. Still, I think every mother in the state knew how to make them from scratch.
Later, when I was a teenager, I’d be invited over to some friend’s house out in the countryside where we’d all climb onto the back of a flatbed wagon covered in fresh straw, and be towed behind an ancient Allis-Chalmers, John Deere, or Massey-Ferguson tractor along the gravel backroads of the county. We’d tell scary stories, sing stupid songs (the classic “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer” being a perennial favorite), and engage in all manner of teenage nonsense.
*
The seasons in Iowa didn’t just pass. They seasoned me—the way my dad would season the applesauce he made out of our fall harvest. They continue to shape my habits, traditions, and general view of the world, long after I left in the mid-90s.
Every autumn, I dig out rustic scented candles for the season, although now it will be bougie things like Trapp Candle’s Teak and Oud Wood or Diptyque’s Feu de Bois. And, since I haven’t lived near apple trees in over thirty years, I’ve learned to adapt to the available local produce. Instead of making applesauce, I put up preserves made from South Carolina peaches I bring home by the bushel from roadside stands.
I can hear some of my Tennessee neighbors upon reading this saying, “But what about apple butter?”
With all due respect to the traditions of my adopted home, I’ve never really cared for apple butter. I don’t know why, but it’s always struck me as applesauce that someone ruined by cooking too long.
There. I said it. Oh, the looks I’m going to get at the next potluck I attend!
When Halloween arrives—though there are few children in our neighborhood—I cannot bring myself to leave the porch light off. So, fearing I might somehow be caught with nothing to give, I purchase stupid quantities of candy and proceed to stuff it into the visiting goblins’ sacks and plastic buckets by the double handfuls.
Unaccountably, the candy I purchase always seems to consist entirely of the sugar-laden greatest hits from my own childhood. Oh, I tell myself “it’s for the children,” that it’s the last thing I need sitting around the house until Thanksgiving. But, in my secret heart, I would be crushed if I didn’t have some leftovers on the first of November.
*
It’s the same with all of the seasons, really. There were traditions for every one of them.
The baked ham and deviled eggs for Easter.
The potato salad, cowboy beans, and hamburgers off the grill for Memorial Day.
Steaks, sweet corn on the cob, and Jell-O salad with the little marshmallows on Independence Day—along with cases of then-illicit fireworks smuggled over the Missouri state line five miles to the south of us.
Even though we all know deep down nothing ever really stays the same, there’s something comforting in the illusion of the unchanging nature of tradition and the way it seems to imprint itself on our souls. You can take the boy out of Iowa, but you can never take Iowa out of the boy, as it were.
I suppose, like most people who grew up in farming country, it was through these traditions that I learned early in life to mark the passage of the seasons and to look outward: at clouds, crops, roads, light, snowdrifts, gravel dust, the color of a field in November, the smell of the air before rain, whether the sky meant beauty or trouble.
I learned that the world was telling me things all the time, but rarely loudly. In this way, I became a part of the land.
But more importantly, I became someone who watches—what all people who grow up in Iowa are said to be.
A Hawkeye.
