An Iowa Garden

Glen and Hanne have been our friends for many years, and you'd have to look far and wide to find a more interesting, well-travelled, renaissance couple than they are. They have a garden that is modest in size, but charming and peaceful, reflecting their personalities. We have enjoyed their hospitality and their garden many times over the years, but I will say our first visit to their house was somewhat auspicious. Hanne brought Glen down to Iowa City, where we now live, and innocently dropped him off to tailgate with our gang (The Bright Family) at an Iowa football game. Now I will admit in those days we were a pretty hard-partying crew, and somehow ended up not leaving the parking lot until it was completely dark, around 9 p.m., and also somehow we all ended up jammed in one R.V., with Glen having talked us all into driving to a small town thirty miles away, where he said a reggae band was performing in a small bar. When we got there, it turned out the reggae band had been there last week, and there was instead a cowboy/biker band wailing away, with the kind of crowd you see in movies, throwing bottles through the windows, and hitting each other over the head with pool cues. Well, being the good friends we are, we didn't kill Glen on the spot (though the vote was close), but it was now 10 p.m., and nobody had eaten since having a hot dog for lunch, but Glen had another idea... he had heard of this fabulous pizza place that had opened up in the small town that Liz and I lived near at that time, so after some grumbling, we all piled back into the R.V., and headed off to get pizza. Now, I thought it was odd that I'd never heard of this place, which Glen said was named "Tasty's", since the town only had about four thousand people. It seemed like we shouldn't have much trouble finding it though, as there wasn't much of a business district. We drove all over that place in the dark, and never could find Tasty's. Finally we stopped somewhere, and Glen looked through the phone book, and found out the place he'd heard about was CASEY'S, which is small town Iowa's version of 7-11, with slices of day old pizza revolving under a heat lamp. Well, by now there was mutiny, and they kicked Glen out at our place at 11 p.m., so he could call Hanne to drive down and pick him up. Not so surprisingly, she hung up on him (more surprisingly, she later married him, and they've been a happy couple all these years... women are strange critters). It was now almost midnight, we'd been up since 6 a.m., and partying since 7:30, but Liz and I drove Glen back north to his new house, which we'd not seen yet. It was pitch black, in the middle of the night when we got there, and the first thing Glen wanted to show us was his back yard, where his present garden is. Now, you can perhaps just tell from the above picture, that his back patio drops off abruptly, at a retaining wall, which drops straight down perhaps 6 or 7 feet, to a steep bank, covered densely with brush and trees. Glen wandered out the back of the house, spreading his arms wide, expounding on how this would someday be his zen garden. Unfortunately, he walked right off the retaining wall... it was just like one of those Wiley Coyotey cartoons... for just an instant he was in mid-air, still talking and waving his arms, and then he was gone in the darkness. We ran to the edge, and peered carefully down into the gloom, seeing nothing, but after a moment, hearing this groan from far down the hill, saying that he'd lost his glasses. Well, I guess that old adage about how being really relaxed protects you from injury is true, as Glen was bruised and scratched, but otherwise fine. We went inside, and listened to Glen's collection of old Frank Sinatra records, and laughed and talked, and got home about 3 in the morning... just another football Saturday, folks...nothing to see...just keep moving.