I dreamed last night of Lansing, Iowa...my dream a mixture of imagined experiences interspersed with scenes from my last visit...I turned to my exposures from that trip hoping to distinguish between what I was remembering and what I was fabricating in my nighttime reverie...
Looking at those images, I was struck once again by the incomparable majesty of the Mississippi River...the silvery Black Hawk Bridge stretching across the main channel...the top of Mount Hosmer, home to a gorgeous park at its peak...with sweeping views of the valley...the river...the boundaries of three states...
Curiously, my dream did not take place in any of these inspiring settings...no, the significant portion occurred at Horsfall's Variety Store...located in town...originally a single store owned by one married couple...now there are two, competing stores...part of the divorce settlement...the ex-wife owns and operates one...the ex-husband, who got to keep the name, owns the other...the "real" one...
The real Horsfall's is the location where my dream morphed into an ordeal...if you had ever been there, you might better understand why this is so...the exterior of the building is wood, long-exposed to the harsh elements of snowy Iowa winters...chipping, red paint its most predominant feature...but inside is where it gets interesting...a rabbit warren of almost impassable aisles...jam-packed with stuff...all kinds of stuff...from all kinds of unexpected places...some of which I am certain has been there since the store first opened...
It is a hoarder's paradise...and as I write that sentence, I get a glimpse of why it held such a prominent place in my dream...it is just like my garage...the one I have stockpiled with the detritus of life and jobs and now-defunct businesses...the one I have been intending to clear out...the one that has been untouched for so long that the guilt is now invading my sleeping hours...
Downtown Lansing, Iowa in the spring...
And lest I mythologize the beauty of Lansing...the place "where eagles soar"...the childhood home of Arnold Kegel (bless you, doctor)...here is my favorite image from the trip...