August Arrival

Day 2, a Monday, (August 10)

The cicadas here are as big and round and wrinkled as your thumb, their squat bodies as seemingly unfit for flight as bomber planes. Our morning began with an inspection of a dead one on our sidewalk, its wings like paperclips that had been once unfolded and then, for not quite the same effect and never again the same use, folded back. At night, those suckers can sing. And they’ve got something on the evening sounds to which we’d grown accustomed in Portland (rattling shopping carts, stoop-conversations, very early morning delivery trucks). You can tell there are millions of cicadas out there in the corn. That’s why their size, once you get one up close, is so completely alarming.

Today, our second day here, was our first for goods and services. Yesterday, a Sunday, we couldn’t find a place open for a beer, striking out four for four as we traveled by bike to the local taverns. It wasn’t just the bars; on Sundays the super Wal-Mart and Marathon station go it alone in conducting their businesses, the infidels. Except, this August Sunday, the pool was also open. We’d first spied this gem from Portland, on Google maps: the outdoor rec center pool, not three blocks from the house we’d be renting, a mysterious sapphire rectangle wedged within a bigger greenish rectangle, near a couple of baseball diamond shapes. In person, there was also a long curving slide, diving boards both high and low, mini-golf, and concessions.

It was a hot day, the kind when steamy air catches in the throat already at nine a.m., and with nothing open we padded our way to the pool in our flip-flops, paying $3 to the high school-aged girl in the booth in the shade who took one look at us and—as we were conspicuous, I guess, in our age and our childlessness—correctly pronounced, “You haven’t been here before, have you.” She explained about the hourly safety checks, one of which would be happening shortly, right as we were walking in. At a blast of a horn everyone cleared the pool, heading toward lawn chairs and towels, tugging at swimsuits and pressing damp footprints onto hot concrete. We began scanning for white plastic chaises of our own, T already naming the dives he would complete once re-entry was permitted. In the meantime, we watched the teenaged lifeguards climb down from their towers, stretch both lazily and self-consciously in their summer tans and sunglasses, and then make their own dives into the pool, surfacing with languid breaststroke kicks to shake their hair gently. Safety check: a wake-up for the guards. For the swimmers, a hint toward toilet use, sunscreen re-application, and concession purchases.

But that was Sunday, the day when nothing was open. Today we had business, and set out on a short walk to the town square, around which traffic circles counter-clockwise only and at the center of which sits the courthouse, still the tallest and most impressive building in town. (It’s Protestant country, here in Illiana. And, though the two competing banks are multi-storied they are still too new-looking for full grandeur of presence.) Other businesses on the ring include a nail parlor, a Goodwill, the Post Office, a bar, the Cable company, and a few other bank/investment type places, and a handful of antique shops. With the shops—faded facades and mismatched awnings, window cases dusty—it’s a little as if a few of the craftiest proprietors simply out-waited their neighbors, took on the whole shebang of the square’s aging, unsold inventory, and changed their signs. Voila! Antiques! The museum of What Was Before Wal-Mart (B.W.M).

It wasn’t quite as hot as the day before—or, we were pretending it wasn’t as our plans for the day did not include the pool and instead we were toting our wallets and ID’s, insurance forms and contact numbers. We crossed the railroad tracks—the long straight seam that divides the town, north and south, and which stretches like the equator itself from both ends toward the diminishing horizon. Then, coming upon the square from the west, we found it: a two-story affair on the back side of the courthouse ring, white bricked and with narrow stairs and high windows. We rounded the corner, assessing casually another emptied, once beautiful building…except, there was a light on inside this one, and a man in a white apron sweeping. A well-designed but homemade sign spelled out opening, each letter occupying its own white square, strung across the window like a necklace.

I convinced T to come with me to inspect. So far, it didn’t seem like we’d be the ones to err on the too-friendly or too-nosy side here. In our quest to find beer, a young person I’d singled out by his long hair and black tee as a likely drinker not only offered a run-down of all the package stores in the next county over and their respective driving distances, but also his cell number in case we got lost. A neighbor had offered to help carry our moving boxes, and a co-worker had presented a phone book (laughably thin) that she’d personalized with labeled sticky tabs for services a newbie might require. At the new corner shop, our new best-friend-to-be didn’t disappoint either. He met us at the door, and invited us in to look around. He had muffins, was opening a bakery. Oh, and he’d recently lived in Portland; he’d just returned to his hometown so he could start his own business.


I’ve moved to new towns before—new towns that are very different from the ones I’d left—so I’ve been preparing myself to rationalize all the feelings correctly, with proper perspective. But hearing the name of your old town unexpectedly on a new person’s lips is like hearing your name spoken once again by a dead lover, raised from the grave—or so I imagine. Out that bakery window flew all the rules T and I had agreed to (we would not talk endlessly about our old town to people in our new town; we would not let on that our new town, with its super store, seemingly no recycling, and smoke-belching, night-glowing, high-fence-having oil refinery built half on top of an old cemetery terrified us just a little).

Also chief among my worries has been the age-old one of any newbie: we wouldn’t make any friends. In our new town, like in the small Midwestern towns both T and I grew up in—there might be a real glut of people in our age group—not to mention people in our age group coupled but not married, with school loans instead of home loans. All good small-town mythologies have it quite clearly that to be successful is to leave—though this doesn’t lessen the moral failure in doing so. (Returning eventually rights the wrong, if you’ve been properly humbled by the failure of your big-city dreams.)

With the baker we talked shopping, whole grains and chain stores and Amish products and grass fed beef. By the time we left, he was pulling out a post-it-note and writing down the name of his friend who teaches yoga classes in town. “There’s no sign or advertising,” he joked. “But if you come to the 6 o’clock class, there’s a few people who know the poses.”

I told him about the yoga class I’d attended in another small Midwestern town. Someone had cross-stitched wall hangings of the various animals and elements after which the poses are called—mountain, pigeon, fish. East meets West. The marriage of the Vedic Tradition and Joanne’s Fabrics.

“Now there’s three of us who don’t belong,” our new friend the baker said, maybe mischievously, maybe ruefully. Later, I’d mention his name and the new bakery to a neighbor who would say, sighing, “Oh, him.”

I was reminded of a co-worker who’d said softly while shaking my hand, “Don’t let the culture here scare you.” Then there was the bookstore owner I’d spoken with on the square. She’d looked carefully around her (completely empty) shop before whispering to me, “There are places to go other than Wal-Mart.”

“There are some good people here,” the baker said finally, and I began to wonder if these were the words, roughly, of a secret code. “You’ll see. There’s a few of us here.”

And maybe there are—and maybe in droves, just like those cicadas that haven’t stopped yet, out there in the corn.