Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

    There are few things I remember so well from growing up as those times when I got to be a boy and play. Around the farm there were many things to keep me occupied. The corncrib was a favorite play place, as was the barn. I would spend hours in the hayloft sitting on piles of molding hay and imagine different games in my mind.

     Before my brother set it ablaze one afternoon, there was an old chicken house on the farm that we kept as a clubhouse complete with old tin play refrigerator and stove. If I remember correctly there weren’t many windows left in it and most of the roof had long ago blown off or just simply rotted away. To get to the back room we went through a front room that had one been home to the roosting hens and held a large stack of wooden fence posts. The cousins and our various playmates spent hours there and gave that fallen in building just a little more life.

      Later on we would clean out the garage and park our bicycles in it, pretending to be fire trucks as we would throw up the heavy wooden door and scream out into the driveway. Behind the barn was the north pasture and we could ride our bikes out there when it was dry, if the cows weren’t bothering us. When we later got a quarter horse named King we would ride him out through that pasture, and up on the terraces where I had gotten both Dad and I in deep doo doo with Mom one school night. He was seeding oats and I wanted to ride in the cedar wagon, evidentially though, I was gone longer than I should have been.

     Farther north past that terraced hill King and I would arrive at Bear Creek, although it wasn’t really much more than a tile ditch with about two buckets of water running through it. It was at this spot on the farm that the transcontinental telephone line stood, with its big thick dull lead conduit of wires hung on poles. King hated water of any kind and always felt like he needed to jump that steep incline, something I was never a fan of.

     There were baseball and football games played in the front and side yards of the farm, along with a spot behind the house in the dirt, under a giant old sugar maple where we took the little plastic cups that plants would come in from the green house and decorated them to make them look like homes and stores. In our little town we would drive our matchbox cars over little dirt roads for hours.

We kept busy on the farm and today when the kids come over, there are still things for them to explore and places to play. It’s a place where with a little imagination, a few sticks and some rocks you can sit by a campfire. A place where a picnic table and a couple of good glasses stolen from the house, along with a few old tin cans can be converted into the finest mud pie diner west of the Raccoon River. A place where a boy with a Red Ryder BB Gun can go hunting big game and do his best not to shoot his eye out.

     As I get older, and more frustrated at times with life, I often wonder why I didn’t take the chance to move away, to find somewhere to start over. Certainly it would have been easy to do, and without the baggage of growing up in ones home town, probably would have been a place I could have really succeeded in. But then I sit on the porch for a bit, bundled up in my coat, a cup of hot cocoa in my gloved hands and I look towards town and across the fields and places I’ve spent my entire life knowing. I am reminded of those days as a boy, and the days with my own kids and I understand why I am here. And maybe someday, my kids will come back for a visit and stand hear looking at the fields and the trees and the traffic as it drives by, and their memories will drift back to those days when they were kids and had a giant playground at their disposal.

See you next week…Remember, we’re all in this together.