...from some 'hippie' looking kid playing a guitar. He has a sweet smile, is wearing a bright green polo shirt and has shaggy brown hair falling into his eyes. A van and a battered old Volvo are parked next to his vegetable stand, which consists of a table piled with corn and tomatoes and watermelon that sits under a white canvas tent in the corner of a convenience store parking lot. Another van is parked nearby: it has a big sign painted on the side that says, "lattes served here", but this van is silent and empty. No lattes in sight. The sweet corn is good, though.
We boil it and eat it with salt and butter, turning it on little black and yellow corn holders. This morning in Trader Joe's down the street in my Boston neighborhood (I am just returned home from my visit back home), I see sweet corn trapped under plastic and sitting under a neon glare. I don't buy any, and I am immediately reminded of the taste of that corn back in Iowa. Perfect yellow squares, geometrically arrayed, neat as a pin. It 'pops' a little as you bite into it and leaves little fibrous strands between your teeth that you have to floss or clean with a tooth pick. Wherever you drive in Iowa, you see corn standing high, in neat rows, in plots of land between houses or buildings, or in fields that stretch as far as the eye can see. In the middle of the country we have the sky instead of the sea to make us think of infinities. The sky dominates the landscape, dwarfs the earth so that your eye is drawn to the sky before it lowers to the ground. When there is lightning, huge lines of light flash-crack across the sky and leave you with a little shiver that runs down your back. The sky, then, is all colors of blue and gray; if it threatens rain, you watch the showers in the distance move across the sky and land, waves of air and cloud and swirling molecules, vibrating the air. Sometimes the storms move toward you as you watch, sometimes they move away. But, always, movement.
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