Cornfields and Eternal Life

This morning I listened to Sufjan Steven's Illinois album. Sufjan has become terribly popular and I endorse him fully: his lyrics are faithfilled and draw one's attention heavenward.


For those of you who don't know, Mr. Stevens is composing one album for each state, beginning of course with the best ones: Michigan and Illinois. I haven't listened much to Michigan yet, but having spent my most significant childhood years in Illinois, this album brought back some wonderful imagery of back then, and perhaps what is to come.



Illinois is beautiful. Frank Lloyd Wright called its beauty "complex," and he was right. Most people from states with mountains and oceans find the Midwest to be bland and boring--but their eyes have not been trained yet for the quiet power of the lines of roads and fields that frame the drastic changes of the sky.

We only lived there officially for three years, in a small town called Freeport, which is about 2 hours West of Chicago. Freeport seemed not to have changed at all since 1945, and our three years there were like a long episode of the Wonder Years.




I know I tend to be nostalgic, but even while we lived there, we knew there was something precious and fragile about the fact that we could go to the corner drugstore with our Dad on a Saturday morning, and Shelley would serve us our vanilla malted shakes and our burgers and fries and smile at us and ask how we were.

It was special that we could go ice skating at the park on the creek and know nearly all the other kids there--and if we weren't two tired we could skate all the way down to the twin caves. It was special that if we walked back through our yard we ended up in a cornfield adjacent to a small woods with deer and rabbits.


Our Illinois church was one of the most wonderful things of all. It was a small German Christian Reformed Chuch in German Valley, Illinois. The drive there was about 45 minutes, through the always-changing cornfields and cattle pastures. The church itself was in the middle of a field, a small white building with the ancestors buried beside it. After church we played hide and seek among the graves, which to me seems perfectly appropriate. In the winter, we stayed every week for potluck, and then had a second worship service in the afternoon, because in the old days, when everyone rode horses and the drive took much longer, that was the way it was done. I often wonder if they keep that tradition. I love my church here in Albuquerque because it often reminds me of my Illinois church--small,close, humble, and faithful.

After we moved away from Freeport, we were still able to come back, because our grandparents' farm is in Belvidere, just outside of Rockford. The farm has been in our family nearly 100 years, since 1912. Grandpa still lives in the house where he was born.

The farm also is filled with memories: the year our extended family acted out the Navity scene in the barn (and I insisted on being Jesus even though I was four), the year we got to borrow a goat from the goat lady down the lane and lead it all over the property, the year Grandma helped us make a playhouse out of the old milk shed, the year we made a swimming pool out of an old drinking trough, the (only) year grandpa let me drive the tractor, the year we had the church picnic at the farm and acted out the three Israelites in the fiery furnace using a silo and a surprise angel-granddaughter...there are too many memories to count.

My family moved around a lot growing up, but in a way Illinois will always accompany my images of home--not my earthly home, but my Odyssian home, the one I'm always trying to get back to. In about a month, I will take husband to see the farm and the fields. I will walk with him to the creek, to the pond, through the knee high green corn, up to the porch, where maybe we can sit with Grandpa for a minute and watch the stars move. And I will wonder if Home will be like this.