The Unexpected Allure of the Midwest

I knew nothing about the Midwest before I met Tracy, and it’s not like I know much now. Really, as we travel around the country and I think about where I might like to live as a home base, the only thing I’ve learned about the Midwest is what it does not have.

It’s nowhere near the ocean. There are no mountains for hiking, no mountain forests, no large woodlands. There are cities (duh, Shelly) but they have an unmistakable Midwest flavor, very foreign from the ones I know. The politics most places are not to my liking, and the winters are cold.

What about what the Midwest does have, though? Just last night we visited with an old friend of Tracy’s in Tracy’s hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, who walked us through a house for sale in his neighborhood, and that turned some key in my brain that opened up the possibilities here.

Yeah, no mountains and no vast forests, but the prairies (those remaining and those being resuscitated) are gorgeous.

And those few days we spent along the Turkey River near Elkader were as full of wildlife and as peaceful as anyplace I’ve stayed outside of Alaska.

A few small cities seem to be more progressive than I’d previously thought (Madison and Cedar Falls, please don’t prove me wrong). They have bike trails and kayaking trails and music in the park in the summers.

Which, of course, leads the mind to winter, which I am entirely unfamiliar with here. Yeah, I spent two winters in Montana, but I was a student, so I was young, not so grumpy, and not a homeowner. So I have no idea what it’s like to live here in the winter, but, believe me, I’ve heard stories.

So, after this friend showed us the house for sale, we walked along a downtown street in Cedar Falls on our way to a brewery, and I considered the riverfront condos we walked along. A condo would mean not so much space as a ranch house, and that’s good. (All Tracy and I could say as we walked through even just the two-bedroom ranch was: What in the world would be put in this house? We literally own not a stick of furniture, unless you count the ottoman.) So, a condo would mean less space, which suits us, plus no yard to keep up, no driveway or walks to shovel. Am I getting closer to a plan?

Houses I’ve lived in.

But, there’s still living through winter to consider. In a condo in Iowa? In how many weeks would we get painfully bored?

We’d want to keep the trailer and go to South Texas for the winters, is how we’d want to remedy that situation. And if we were in a condo, we’d have to pay to park the trailer in storage. In which case, we might as well get a house with a driveway so we could keep the trailer with us and avoid storage costs.

Do you know the size of a house and lovely wooded yard you can get for $100-200,000 in Iowa? Quite the spread compared to the brownstones I had looked into in Richmond, Virginia, that cost way more than twice that much. For that money in Iowa, we might have enough left over to travel in the summers with the trailer.

Here’s the snag, though. If we travel to the mountains of Montana and Canada in the summers and travel to the beaches of the Gulf Coast in winter, why would we bother with the expense and trouble of a house sitting empty in Iowa?

Welcome to my brain when it comes to thinking about where I might like to live.