We Wait--the Haunting Space between Care and Scare
A Guest Column by Jan Libbey
BY Jan Libbey
GUEST COLUMNIST
Jan Libbey’s work has been informed by a love for the land and rural communities expressed through farming and community organizing. She and her husband, Tim Landgraf, began One Step at a Time Gardens (OSTG) in 1996, marketing fresh produce and pastured poultry for sales through their own Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and, with other producers, through North Iowa Fresh, LLC, through 2021. She helped to found Healthy Harvest of North Iowa, a nonprofit supporting local food system development, and served as Executive Director from 2011 - 2019. From 2021 – 2024, she worked alongside a broad spectrum of local food and farm leaders and helped coordinate the Iowa Food System Coalition’s development of a statewide food system plan – Setting the Table for All Iowans. Today, she is focusing on her experiences at the local level, weaving local food access and food system development, and political organizing. She’s also making more time for family and two grandchildren.
Along with Tim, she has been recognized with the 2012 Spencer Award for Sustainable Agriculture, the 2022 Sustainable Agriculture Achievement Award from Practical Farmers of Iowa, and has been featured in several books related to her vision for the critical importance of community and food relationships.
Just recently, my day went from participating in a mental health training to serving as part of a rapid response team action. I had returned home from the training, a two-day commitment, and was settling into a Friday evening routine when the phone pinged.
Then it pinged again, and again. I checked; our Rapid Response Team was calling for assistance. A family had been stopped, no arrest this time, but the lack of child restraints was a step too far for the officer. Our team had to help round up car seats and assist this family in getting home safely. I, being the closest, was the designated first contact and went to wait with the family.
Let me tell you this story where the chasm between systems of care and systems that scare are as haunting as our declining rural communities.
The afternoon was warm, the sun dishing up unseasonal temperatures. No coat was needed as I stretched my legs on a break from a long meeting. My path wandered through the parking lot, and I found a stretch of sidewalk to explore. The snow piles from the recent snowstorm were reduced, but still brightened the parking and lawn, chilling the air despite the sun. The sidewalk ended, and I turned around. The meeting break was coming to an end anyway. As I stepped from the sidewalk, crossing the entrance to the parking lot, I came across the slush edges of snow slinking down into the street edge…and then I stomped. The delicious feel of ice slush under my foot as it came down hard and fast was met with the associated spray. You have to get just the right conditions for full satisfaction. There has to be some snow, some ice, and some melting – all held in the right combination – for the full resistance to my foot and yet the wonderful squoosh and splash that results.
In a flash, I was back 50 years – playfully stomping slush piles in my youth. Not long after, but worlds away, I sat in the dark, wind whistling outside, red lights of the wind turbines blinking at me, peering into the situation. Why are two cars just waiting? Waiting, waiting?
The wind whistles.
I’m glad for this farm storage pull-off, but it’s oh so lonely. The wind whistles, the lights peer – still asking why two cars are waiting. The utility poll beside us suggests maybe there was more here at one time, but no longer.
The lonely, hollowness of the Dakotas has moved in. Few would openly admit that “our” rural is or has become “that” haunted rural. A decade or more ago, they wrung their hands, kicked the dirt as they looked at their feet, and described out loud - “Our community used to be home to a grocer, a bowling alley, two car dealerships, and more…”
The visions of what was so vivid in their minds. The longing, so hollow on their lips. And who pulls their hurting memories into today’s development initiatives?
No one seems to know how to build the bridge between now and then. No one seems to know how to both mourn and pull the spirit of the past into the efforts of the future.
And two cars wait, the lights blink with vacant curiosity. The wind whips. The cars tell the story of the crumbling. Families who came, hoping for opportunity, today are pinched between a system that depends upon their labor and yet is trying, however misdirected, to create a new reality. They weren’t consulted in either scenario.
The children are hungry. I don’t know how the adults (mere children themselves) are doing -- patient, scared, tired, considering solemnly the blank slate they hold?
This one hollow space doesn’t know what to blink back at the lights. We wait.
Carefree times have left all of us. The long work of recreating a path calls for new steps, a long, patient, persistent journey. It calls for all of us to be shoulder to shoulder – not one sad community of memory lane, one carful simply yearning to get home, some hopeful strategist imagining all the layers that are truly needed to craft a way forward where all see themselves in the future. These pieces need to see one another, have the support and gumption to create a new path forward together.
We wait. We’ve all been waiting…but don’t know how or simply didn’t know we could ask, could peer into the situation, and imagine anew.
The blinking lights bring no judgment. They aren’t blinded by preconceived answers. They just look and wonder.
Today’s warm temperatures created those slush piles. The stomping elicited that forgotten joy. Tonight, the wind whistles, and the air is cold. We wait.
Join roughly three dozen members of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative in Storm Lake on April 23 and 24 as we swap ideas by day and gather for music at night. On Thursday evening, the Weary Ramblers take the stage, followed the next night by a circle of our own writers and musicians at legendary Byron’s in Pomeroy.
Evening events are open to paid subscribers (free, with guests welcome for a small fee). Not yet supporting a writer? Subscribe to as many as fit your budget and brighten someone’s week. We are committed to keeping participation open to talent regardless of means, and that promise depends on readers who step forward to help sustain the work.
If this community matters to you and you’re able to lend a hand, we would love to have you with us.
Let us know if you can join us by using these two RSVP forms.
My column will always be free, but please consider upgrading to paid if you can afford it.
I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Please check out our work here. I also publish Cedar Creek Nature Notes, about Violet the Dog and my adventures on our morning walks at Cedar Bluffs Natural Area in Mahaska County, Iowa.
And I’m now on TikTok, believe it or not. Here you go…I’m publishing videos and stories that you might not see here.
I certainly get the point of "connecting the past to the present". in my small town, when things that are tried simply miss the mark. What works closer to large cities for small towns often doesn't work in more distant rural communities. The drive to get those city populations to a small handful of businesses just is not there! Yet, at the same time, minority populations, especially Hispanic and emigrant ones , are looking for just such a place that is safe and secure. A place where they can develop their skills in English while creating a home for themselves and their descendants! No different than those who came from Ireland, Germany, Denmark etc. over 100 years ago! When "Lady Liberty" offered those immigrants, be they ever so humble, a place to breathe free! With few restrictions and very few hoops to jump through other than waiting for citizenship in about five years.
This xenophobic and down right nasty treatment of human beings is not only wrong, but the very thing many rural communities need to stay alive is being stolen from us in these distant communities of small rural "fly over" communities. The Federal "derangement syndrome" that is pushing this is hitting bottom and those who supported it, are feared to be losing ground! We have a whole house full of these lackeys from Iowa who bent over to lick the boots of a fascist regime and ignoring Iowan's! We need to restore the humanity Iowa once knew and accepted in the past. The Iowa that made public schools available to all over 100 years before the Federal government did. The Iowa that first accepted the fact gay and bi-sexual human beings should enjoy human rights. (rescinded just recently?)
Thank you Bob and Jan.
I could very viscerally feel that pull-off by some grain bins, where once probably stood a farmstead full of life. I drive by those kinds of spaces every day. I suppose most of us do.
Waiting - - but not knowing.
Choosing kindness, even though that might not fit with what surrounds you. Finding community in those that want to help, and not frighten the strangers looking for a life.