Inside a Column, or How Sausage is Made

I was deleting some stuff from my BlackBerry when I came across some curious, forgotten memopad files. Essentially, they're electronic sticky notes.

Often, when I'm contemplating a column, and I'm standing somewhere waiting for coffee or a beer or bail, I'll tap a stream of brainstorming consciousness into my BlackBerry. I save it and look at it later when it's time to write.

I've never gone back and read any of them until now. And their resemblance to some sort of bad, mangled poetry made me laugh.

So, for fun, I thought I'd share one, along with the column that resulted.

Warning: the free form jazz BlackBerry odyssey that comes first  is wholly unedited and includes  typos etc. Enjoy.

Overgrown, green and golden. Hazy, like a painting. Bursting peak. Tomato plants sagging with fruit. Corn, zucchinis, Missed out on the heat Miss living in the country. Mornings this time of year, coffee, barefoot. Dog run free accross huge yard.

Garden out by the road had been fallow. Tomatos grew over my head. Few people stopped to ask what I did. Planted was pretty much all I could say.

Sweet corn coons. Electric fence deployed in time to save about a dozen ears.

Frogs, owls, cattle. Neighbor stood on my patio and called in his herd to our fence with a martini glass I his hand. Come boss.

Gregarious guy who liked a strong drink. Irish family with 19 kids, three mothers. Dad was gregarious too.

Pulled a calf.

Road drifted shut

So cold in the living room during a party we could stack beer in the nw corner. It stayed ice cold Summer miss the most.

Couldn't see our house from the road, shaded by huge oaks.

Screen porch

No insulatioin. Propane line snaked like a slinky across the ground. Made me nervous.

Mice. Raccoons lived in the porch roof, behind our bedroom wall. They were nocturnal. We were not. Conflict ensued Dead squirrell in the furnace Lit fires for warmth Banker from Chicago built. Baby on the way. Fear of it being carried off by mice. Moved to town, house on busy steet. Postage stamp yard. Dog must have cursed us every day.

And from that, came this, published July 28, 2009:

This is the time of year when I most miss living in rural Iowa.

So now you know where columns come from. And that I would be jobless without spell check.

I was reminded of this while driving over the weekend to see friends and visit my parents, who still live in the home where I grew up on a gravel road a few miles from Belmond.

Summer has reached its peak. The countryside is overgrown in dark, late-July shades of green. Farm fields are bulging at their barbed wire and gardens are sagging under the weight of tomatoes and zucchinis. Late in the day, when a low sun cuts through summer's haze, the landscape goes from photo to painting.

It made me think back to the couple of years my wife and I rented a farmhouse in rural Story County. It was just Katherine and me and our dog. Nothing against our lovely children, but this is the sort of pre-child stuff that occurs to you around, say, hour two of a long road trip. Maybe after 62 rousing, youthful renditions of "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt."

We lived in a house tucked so far into a grove of oaks that you couldn't see it from the road. The oaks opened onto farmland beyond the long lane. Behind the house, a hillside led to a creek.

We lived one full summer there, the first after we got married. We spent a lot of mornings walking in the grass barefoot with a cup of Joe while our dog ran free around the massive yard. We spent a lot of nights sipping beer and listening to music on the screened porch. There were sounds all around you don't hear as well in town -- frogs, locusts, owls and our neighbor's cattle.

Our neighbor/landlord once called his whole herd to the fence beside our house, while tipsily holding a dainty martini glass. "Come boss, come boss," he yelled between gin hiccups.

But let's face it. It wasn't all Currier and Ives. The house was mouse-central. They stored dog food in our shoes and left presents in every drawer. Raccoons lived in the porch roof behind our bedroom wall. They were nocturnal. We were not.

A small propane stove was supposed to heat the whole place. Not even close. It wasn't unusual to awake in winter to a main floor temperature in the 40s. Good news: Beer stacked in the living room stayed ice-cold. Bad news: The pipes often froze. And we probably could have lived without knowing what it smells like when an unlucky squirrel falls down the stove chimney.

When we found out child No. 1 was on the way, it was time to leave our shack/Shangri La. We moved to a busy street in town. I don't think our dog has ever forgiven us. I don't blame her, especially this time of year.