On her wall was a butterfly collection, boxed in a simple frame with a black backing.  Pinned there, each was varied, beautiful in their own right.  They were also all dead.  That was the thing that separated them from us.

“So how does it feel to be vigorously dating?” she asked.

I smiled.  “That’s quite a combination of words.”

“It’s true isn’t it?  You said you’ve been out on more dates the last several months than you have in the rest of your life combined.”

I shrugged.  “Vigorous just makes it sound so action-packed.”  She smiled too.

“What have you learned out there?”

I thought for a moment.

“I hear people tell me repeatedly that they are looking for something different.  They also seem to be generally looking for something easy and comfortable.  I wonder if anyone appreciates the role the latter plays in not getting the former done.”

“That’s an excellent observation.”

“You get the credit.”

“How’s that?”

“Last time we spoke you asked about the gals I meet and find great respect for but don’t pursue.  I told you that for some it had to do with a lack of spark.  You asked how that spark thing had been working out for me.  I laughed.”

“I remember that.”

“Anyway, I think you were right.  Things feel comfortable and easy when they are familiar, and I think that familiarity has a lot to do with that “spark” everyone is talking about.  Some act surprised about how things turn out in their relationships, how the same situations repeat themselves, but should we be surprised that our emotions lead us to familiar turf?

We argue that the feeling in the beginning is different this time, yet our repetitiveness in which we fall for it makes it the same.”

“I think you are learning a lot.”

“If I’m learning, it will be reflected in my choices, right?  And to find out, we need to get out there.  I might have learned something else.”

“What’s that?”

“Hope is a comfortable feeling.  It lets us believe if we keep choosing the same thing, somehow it is going to be different.”

“Maybe that’s a good topic for future thinking.”

“I’ll never have kids, you know.  If I did, though, I’d want them to learn how to get used to being uncomfortable.”

“Why?”

“It’s the only way out of the corner we all paint ourselves into.  It’s how we are rewarded for discovering something more new about ourselves, what we believe, and about others.”

“Do you think you can do it?”

“I think that is something worth hoping for.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“I reached out to someone I dated in the past.  I told her I’d be curious what would happen if we continue to hang out.  I think she knew then all the things I’m talking to you about now.”

“And you didn’t realize it then?”

“No.  How would I?  It’s impossible to tell anyone something their ears aren’t ready for.”

“Did you hear back?”

“Yes.  She’s happily seeing someone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.  She’s a great gal.  She said something curious, though.”

“What was that?”

“She told me I should write a blog about men dating.”

“Sounds like a fantastic idea.”

“Action-packed, I’m sure.”

I was in Madison County.  Katie Olthoff was speaking.  While she works for the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, she and her husband raise turkeys.

( Katie’s own blog:  http://www.onthebanksofsquawcreek.com/ )

“We got the opportunity to put up a couple of turkey barns.  This was huge for us.  My husband would be able to leave his job with benefits and farm full time.  We would be able to create something the boys would have the chance to continue.  It was exciting.  I was proud of what we were doing.

I would share the story with the people I knew.   Some asked me how many we would raise.  I told them 120,000 birds a year.  That’s when I heard it.  ‘Oh, it’s a factory farm then.’

I didn’t understand what they were talking about.  It’s not a factory.  It’s our family.

Factory farms are like the monster under the bed my boys are afraid of.  You grab the cover, pull it back, and show them he’s not there.  He doesn’t exist.  We show people our farm, and then they understand that it’s not a factory. But they still believe factory farms are out there somewhere, just like my sons believe the boogey man is going to get them as soon as I leave the room.”

The article begins immersed in the nostalgia of Norman Rockwell’s America.  Nostalgia is simply the boogey man’s more attractive sister.  We do the present no favors in remembering the past better than it was.

In Norman Rockwell’s actual America, many of today’s conservation practices were non-existent.  Fields were plowed and worked repeatedly and laid bare over the winter.  Terraces were rare, and so were farm ponds.  A wetland was the piece of ground your Grandfather just hadn’t drained yet.  Buffers and no-till were unknown.

The technology revolution some abhor brought all of that to agriculture.  Farm families have been figuring out how to adopt them ever since.  Living and working in the Badger Creek Watershed, a farmer-initiated watershed going back to the 1950s, I get a chance to see that evolution everyday.  Everyday I’m reminded of the work left to be done.

Stowe maintains modern agriculture is the problem.  I’ll maintain modern agriculture, much more so than that of Rockwell’s, is part of the solution.  Modern agriculture has changed not just how we farm.  It invests continually in making scientific assessments about the impact we are having, in finding flexible, non-bureaucratic solutions, and the funding needed to bring them to fruition.

It seems that the smart, affable man at the Des Moines Water Works, who admittedly looks back in nostalgia to Norman Rockwell, also looks back with nostalgia to the environmental policy of the 1970’s.  He can look as he chooses.  It is a policy, however, both the regional administrator of the EPA and the current US Secretary of Agriculture seem eager to move beyond.  Farm families are too.

At the end, Stowe speaks of social justice.  It is an interesting term to throw out by a man repeatedly using the term “industrial agriculture,” a term which serves to dehumanize those engaged in agriculture today.  His own Des Moines Water Works Lawsuit seeks damages from 10 drainage districts which make up a very small part of the Raccoon River Watershed.  These districts have no way to raise funds, save from the few farm families that make them up.  Where is the social justice in that?

Among their few numbers, we will not find the boogey man that is industrial agriculture.  I know he’s not under my bed.  If you pull the covers back, you’ll find he isn’t under yours either.  Mr. Stowe seems convinced he’s at least under his.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

The Virgin of Cobre is a statue of the Virgin Mary, found floating in the sea by two Indians and a slave in 1608 off the coast of El Cobre, Cuba.  She has nothing to do with baseball, save for the fact that the two seemingly makeup the background in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  We often assume the background to be of less relevance.  Perhaps we shouldn’t with Ernest.

In his book, some critics point to an absence of women, believing it underscores the lack of regard the author had for them.  There are actually several.  There is the old man’s deceased wife, whose former possessions are described as relics and whose image is shrouded in the cleanest thing the old man owns.  One of those possessions is an image of one of the other women in the book, the Virgin of Cobre.

The statue was found perfectly dry, floating on a board on which was inscribed, “I am the Virgin of Charity.”  Charity meant something different then.  It was the virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake.  The King James Bible translated the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13:13 as, “And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”  King James opted not to use “love,” knowing perhaps the slew of things we all mean by that.

Hemingway’s old man, Santiago, has faith.  He has hope.  Perhaps his most admirable quality, however, is the charity he endures with.

In 1630, the statue would replace the patron saint of Spain, St. James, or as he is known in Spanish, Santiago, atop the altar in the church at El Cobre.  In 1928, she would get an entirely new house altogether.  Beneath the display of the Virgin of Charity in today’s El Cobre Basillica, is a room housing the gifts left for the Virgin’s intercession to the Almighty.  Some of them were given as part of request.  Some were a token of thanks.  Among them is a 1954 medal for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought.  But you have a right to.  Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.  Come on and kill me.  I do not care who kills who.