Walking down a snowy memory lane and finding home

Then, we walked because he was a puppy and had boundless energy we needed to walk off. Now, we walk because I’m a middle-aged woman with a chocolate shake to walk off.

Then, as now, we started out just as snow began to fall. Then and now, and always, I was reminded, a walk in Indianola is a trip down memory lane.

We walk along Ashland, and past the home of Des Moines Metro Opera founder Robert Larsen, where Don Berry, a former owner of the Record-Herald once lived. Then right on G Street to Memorial Park. It was a good day to remember interviewing Brad Green, Indianola’s off the cuff weather guy, at his home near the park.

I used to walk my kids to the park to swing. Now, I stop to admire the sculpture of a skater near the skate park, and Banks eagerly sniffs his way down to the Jerry Kelley Trail. The trees seem all encompassing and he would love to run through them, but I’m not sure he will come back, so we continue on-leash up the hill to the Simpson baseball field. They played baseball there last week, and will again soon, but for now the outlines of the infield and outfield are only slightly visible beneath a blanket of snow.

We walk along and I ponder the house at the corner of D Street and Girard. It once belonged to Harry Browne, who built the home and was the brother of Ilo Browne, who married Henry Wallace, who befriended George Washington Carver and became vice president of the United States. Later it was the home of Jim and Marty Ford. Their daughter, Mary, sent me a history of the house compiled by its present owner, Jessica Halgren Hertzberger. I ponder how the world can seem so big, but really be so small, with endlessly intersecting circles.

We walk by the pedestrian plaza, which I will always think of as C Street, although I like the emptiness of it when we walk there. But today we keep going, into Buxton Park. Sharon Betsworth and I used to meet on the concrete benches that once stood by the current gazebo when we were in junior high and high school. We’d ride our bikes, her from her house on Detroit, me from mine on Howard, and we’d hang out until it got too hot or we got too bored. Then we’d pedal over to Hillman Hall, where my mom worked.

She’d let us scavenge the cans and bottles her work study students left behind, and we’d set off for Pamida to trade the cans for quarters to fuel an afternoon of Pac Man in the air-conditioned comfort of the store.

Now, a snow-covered garden surrounds the flag pole outside of Hillman, and a plaque notes it’s in memory of my mom, a long-time Simpson friend and employee. Banks never met her, but he likes to sniff the plantings.

From there, we watch as a fellow dog walker frolics with what looks like Banks’ friend Bella. Braver than I am, the two run along the music building. Banks and I walk more slowly by Smith Chapel, where both my sister Lora and I got married, and to the Masonic Temple, where I ate school lunch when in fifth and sixth grade, and learned to play the flute, even though band director Donn Modlin told me my mouth was the wrong shape.

By now, my boots and coat are soggy and Banks’ newly groomed coat is shedding water. I’m sure he wondered why we decided to take our long walk the day after I had his warm winter fur shaved away.

We turn at what we used to call the “lose a show movie theatre,” saved by Tim McConnell as a photo studio, and now the Stitching Place, which has everything I ever need on the rare occasions I sew. We continue along Ashland to the Methodist Church where people leaving church on Sunday or community meals during the week apparently drop scraps of food. Banks and I tussle as he goes in hot pursuit of a bit of bagel covered in snow, and I urge him to head for home.

It’s interesting how memories work. Looking back doesn’t bring forth a film version of our lives, but instead photos. Snapshots that sometimes vanish for years, and then come to light again when some odd alchemy of sight, and sound and moment, brings them back to us.

Sometimes, as I walk, I wonder what adventures I missed by never really leaving Indianola. What would life be if Mark and I had taken those jobs in Fort Madison before we ever got married? What if we had accepted the job in Minnesota not long after Duncan was born, or if we had pursued a job in journalism elsewhere in Iowa after my job was eliminated, instead of creating our own here in Indianola?

And even while I walk and wonder what I may have missed by staying, I also wonder what my kids have missed by leaving. We walk by Overton Funeral Home and continue along Ashland, and I am reminded, when we get to our house, why I never left.

It’s home.