Farming Windmills

Driving back home I’d purchased an atlas somewhere in Alabama. That GPS is fine but not fine enough. I needed to see where I was on a real map.

This is not the atlas. This is just to show you what Iowa looks like. I’d bet alot of you have no idea what Iowa looks like. I barely know and I live right on top of it. We spent a night on the way down to Alabama in Keokuk, Iowa. See that bottomest rightest town down there? We stayed there. Just thought you’d like to know.

On our way home, when we got to back into Iowa, I was doing a little bit of driving (Ricky Nugget had done most of the driving. And by “most” I mean “except for the 2 hours that I drove”) and Ricky Nugget was perusing my new atlas. (The next 2 photos are actual scanned images of my new atlas)

As we were nearing Iowa City, Ricky Nugget said, “This is the future birthplace of James T. Kirk” he said.

“How can you remember that?” I asked. Which is a question I’m forever asking Ricky Nugget, my own Wikipedia. He can remember everything. Why just about an hour earlier he and Thing 1 had been talking about Communist China and Ricky Nugget was spewing who was the Chinese leader in 1948. All sorts of crap that made me question my own intelligence.  People will tell me “you are, too, smart!” (while patting my  head) and all I can do is compare myself to my husband, Rainman.

“It says here on the map” he replied.

“What do you mean ‘it says here on the map?'” I asked.

And then he showed me.

Well, I’ll be damned. Somebody in the atlas-making world has a sense of humor. I think I bought myself a great atlas and can’t wait to find out if there are other nerd facts in it.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to the Breakfast Gal at the Fairfield Inn in Keokuk, Iowa.

Homegirl was the hardest damn worker I have ever seen in my life. She maintained that breakfast room like nothing I’d ever seen before. She was the hovercraft of the breakfast room. The minute I took a bagel, she put in another bagel (never mind that there were still 7 bagels ready to be taken). The minute somebody took a creamer out of the basket, she took that basket out, added a new creamer, and realigned it all. Nothing was out of place. Nothing went without replacement within mere seconds of someone taking an item.

It was like OCD had found it’s place. Bless you, Keokuk Fairfield Inn Breakfast Gal.

I will have you know that Ricky Nugget put me through some Immersion Therapy to and from home. He drove us smack dab through the middle of one of those Windmill Farms.

“It’s a wind farm, not a windmill farm” he corrected me.

And that got me to imagining it as a windmill farm. Planting little bitty windmill seeds then harvesting the grown windmills in the fall, under one of those giant harvest moons.

Made me like those windmills more.

Makes me want to write a children’s book about a farmer who grows windmills.

No. You  may not steal my idea.

Besides, your book wouldn’t have my details including buff teenage farm boys baling windmills, would it?

I thought not.