To find our values, we must look beyond the literal

Most of us know a place where our values can be found. These locales, usually deep from our past, don't directly shout their significance to others or us; instead, like an impressionistic painting they live in us through their poignancy.

In Iowa, as across the Midwest, one such place is the farm.

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Gazing across a verdant field as harvest approaches, many can recall the stories of determination, of incredible privation, to which our parents or grandparents held tight so they could survive year after year, just to build their stead. After more than a century of hard work between generations, such homesteads in the Midwest can stretch hundreds of acres about a clapboard farmhouse.

Often those homes were constructed during the First World War's high prices and good times. Many farmers deliberately designed them so the front door faced the churning windmill that constantly shifted in the ever changing but always present breeze.

Just beyond the farmhouse and windmill will sit a red barn and crumbling granary, each added following the next great war. Two decades after that, when many of us were just children, a pole shed and modern silos were erected, their silver caps glowing in both day and moonlight, as if stars.

Surrounding the home farm, broad fields cross the prairie swell for half a mile in every direction. All spring, golden sunshine warms and rain moistens the black soil, and by early summer the wind blows in the heady scent of blossoming green. Through summer and aut-umn, those same winds carry the bawling of white-headed cattle let loose to graze upon the dormant crop.

Wire fences mark the boundaries of these farms; sometimes a shallow creek outlines the fourth side. Along that stream, where the grass never shrivels from the hot winds, lay the remnants of the first family homestead, of which nothing is left but decayed wood and an ill osage orange tree, tough-wooded and bushy in branches only.

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Though there were moments of deep cursing, every family member loved the land and was proud of their farm. And it never meant more than during those years of struggle, when sliding corn, bean, wheat or milk prices conspired with ever-rising costs to destroy the spread just as blizzards, dust bowls and locusts had dealt devastating blows to our forefathers.

Of course, a cow could be replaced, the soil replenished and the crops replanted. It is not always so with our inspirations, though.

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Some people prefer to live in the vanilla world of numbers and hard facts. Granted, those aspects of human existence can not be ignored.

But to forsake the expressionistic elements permeating humanity is to deny the way each of us finds strength, joy and meaningfulness in a universe that is not entirely fair or always fruitful.

Sometimes to find value, we must look beyond the literal. It isn't just a corn stalk, a fence post or a barn, after all.

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To wit: A former colleague. Though an adult living in the big city, she always remained proud of having grown up on a farm, boasted of being a country girl through and through from her first pair of bib overalls as a toddler until those summers of her college years when she ran errands to town for combine parts.

She loved the wind's sound and hung chimes upon her parents' porch to capture it. Through the day and into the night, those hollow bars sang magically, as if fairy dust flung from a wand.

But of all the composers she loved, her favorite was the windmill. She said its purling reminded her of a beating heart.

(published Sept. 7, 2003)