Just Down The Block

When I was growing up in small town Iowa I lived in a house painted white with a wide porch that spanned the front, and down two flights of concrete stairs was the brick lined street with sidewalks shaded by giant elm trees.  I and my five siblings walked every day to the private school on the banks of the Iowa River, a distance of over ten or twelve blocks which required crossing the main road from the north heading toward Cedar Rapids, what we would call a major highway nowadays, but since it was within the town's border what traffic there was had slowed considerably. Plus this was the depression.  Who owned a car?  There were still horses being used for transportation.  When I was sixteen we moved to the "new" part of town and since it was just my mother and little sister now, we lived in a modern bungalow type place with one and one half baths, three bedrooms, on a cul de sac, oh, how boring, not that I quite realized that in those days, and I rode the city bus to the extreme edge of the other side of town where there was a new high school building.  I shall jump forward to the years of the domesticity I created with my second wife with whom I first lived in a kind of horses stall and hay loft converted into a very "cute" house built against the side of a hill, once upon  a time hay came in above, horses below, I suppose. This place had very small rooms with uneven tilting floors, but across the upper portion was a porch running its length that looked out over a state forest reservation, all very beautiful and extremely quiet.  The only down was I had to drive into New Haven to teach which left my wife stuck with the new born and desperate in her loneliness.  Then we lived in a cul de sac in Palo Alto which was encircled by modern glass boxes each with two adults and three to four children who played together in safety in the middle of the cul de sac and all walked the six blocks to the local public grade school. My wife kept the car and I walked the several miles to Stanford, the beginnings of my liberation from the automobile.  The area was a serene, only occasionally reacting to traffic noise from the freeway not visible at all beyond a wooden fence.  Apart from a stint in Rome in which we lived on the second floor of a palazzo with gardens to look upon from every window or from two terrazzi where one could catch the sun, the next several years were in a suburb of Boston where we lived in a large Edwardian house, again where I would walk the several miles to work,  with plenty of room for the four children to spread out, entertain their friends, and for my wife and me to grow apart in our separate spaces.  Then the kids went their way, my wife and I went our own ways, and we were all virtual grown ups.  "I'll be home for Christmas" goes the song, only there was no home that one could go home to.  And nowadays when we live in the Midwest, Canada, Florida, New Hampshire, and my ex-wife is dead, there really is no more coming home.  The children are all married and go to their spouses' parents or some of the grandchildren are beginning to go out on their own.  Whatever happened to Iowa?