Posts under ‘Life Before Iowa’

This past weekend, I went to see my college roommate, Jenny, and her husband and four-year-old son in Newport News, Virginia. It had been nine months since she came to see me, over Labor Day Weekend, just before I moved from the Washington D.C. area to Iowa City. That weekend, she came by herself, so [...]

Last weekend, I arrived home from swimming laps at Iowa City’s City Park pool and decided it was time for some pasta. We had perfectly delicious grilled chicken in the refrigerator and plenty of salad greens, but I had been fighting a craving for sage-butter pasta for days, and couldn’t stave it off any longer. [...]

There was a time when hummus was not available in every grocer’s refrigerator case. Before the ubiquitous tubs of Tribe of Two Sheiks and Athenos provided a dip for pita or carrots or tortilla chips, my Mom was making hummus for parties at our house in Spain or, subsequently, in Nigeria. I loved the tangy, [...]

In Virginia, squirrels are the ubiquitous yard rodent. We have squirrels in Iowa City, too, but more often than not, the daily visitors are rabbits, instead. Even before we planted a garden, they seemed to be everywhere. When I first moved here, I thought they were adorable. I’ve always had an affinity for rabbits, and [...]

As Steve turned over the soil where our garden plot would eventually be, I lifted up clump after clump of grass, loosening the particles of dirt from the roots and letting them fall into the emerging bed. I sifted, my fingers filtering out not only the dirt, but a world of other material as well. [...]

Just after I turned three, my parents and I moved to Bonn, Germany, where Dad was posted at the U.S. Embassy. We lived in a ground floor apartment in a neighborhood of two-story apartment buildings built for ex-pats in town to work for the U.S. government, and my parents installed a sandbox for me on [...]

On Easter Sunday, I stopped at the grocery store on the way back from church. Sometime that week, a series of what looked like temporary quonset huts had sprung up in the parking lot of the Hy-Vee, our local supermarket. In front of them, arranged like sandbags, were pallets of peat and potting soil and [...]