iowa homesteads

Driving through Iowa on our way to Omaha this weekend, the view out the window was mostly farms. Neat little homesteads and barns, sheltered inside a ring of trees, surrounded by rolling fields of farmland - some freshly tilled in preparation for planting, some still covered with the dead stalks of last year's corn. I'd never been in these parts before, and I was really taken by the farmhouses - most of them white, square, solid, inviting homes. I've seen farmland and homesteads in Mississippi, Oregon and the upper Midwest, but I think it was those boxy, white houses that struck me as distinctive about this particular place. I found myself wondering about the people who live in them, what life is like for them. Is it anything like the families in A Thousand Acres, the novel by Jane Smiley? (I'm afraid that's about as far as my literary exposure to Iowa extends.) Anyway, I thought it was oddly beautiful, so I snapped a few photos from the car. Nothing spectacular, but if you've never seen Iowa beyond the paintings of Grant Wood, this gives you some idea.





Here are a couple of Grant Wood paintings, just for fun!



We also saw quite a few windmills, and we wanted to know more about them. Do they generate electricity for entire towns, or collections of farms? Why are there so many in Iowa, yet none that we could see once we crossed into Minnesota?