Read Online In All Deep Places by Susan Meissner - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Susan Meissner
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I could say it here. This was a magical place.
Halcyon sat on an expanse of prairie three hours northeast of Des Moines, two hours south of the Minnesota border and thou sands of miles away from the mother country of the Dutch immi grants who settled the town in the late 1800s. Its founders initially chose a fine Dutch name for the town, but the railroad owners couldn’t pronounce it—and since they owned more land than the settlers, the most educated of the railroad magnates changed it to Halcyon. The soothing name was supposed to attract newcomers so that the town would blossom and the railroad would make lots of money selling off its many parcels of land. But every child, and actually every adult, had to be told what “halcyon” meant. Young sters who thought the town was named after Hal Somebody were set straight at Halcyon Elementary School as soon as they were old enough to understand that there are lots of complicated words that have simple meanings. Adults who didn’t know that “halcyon” meant “peaceful and serene” found out as soon as they were brave enough to ask.
In its best days, Halcyon could meet every household need. It had at least one of everything essential to modern-day living. A bank. A hardware store. A factory. A hospital. A school. A library. A furniture store. A car dealership. A theater. Even a shoe-repair shop. There were half-a-dozen churches, four gas stations, three restaurants, two gift shops, and a drugstore. There were concerts in the park, community ice-cream socials where there was standing room only, and long lines to get theater tickets on Friday nights.
By 1982, however, the year my dad built the tree house, times had changed for small Midwest towns like Halcyon. The ease with which a person could make the trip to Cedar Falls, about an hour’s drive away, and even to Des Moines, changed the way Halcyon High School graduates chose a career. It changed the way their parents shopped. It even changed the way farmers farmed. The theater had long since closed, as had the furniture store, the shoe-repair shop, and two of the gas stations. The hospital had been downsized to a clinic. Typical headlines in the Halcyon Herald, my father’s newspaper, read, “School board discusses problem of declining enrollment” and “Corn prices fall again” and “Another downtown business closes its doors.”
But there were also good things happening at that time in Halcyon. It wasn’t all bad news. The town was still fiercely devoted to its high school’s sports teams. Retired farmers still met for coffee at the downtown cafe every morning at nine o’clock. The churches were still full on Sundays. There were still old businesses on Main Street like Delft Delights, as well as new ones, like Denny’s Movie Rentals. The paint factory was still hiring people. And the grain elevator at the edge of town had added a new metal storage bin that glistened like a mammoth tin can in the Iowa sunshine.
The town still had its newspaper, which was deemed by all as just as necessary to the town’s survival as the school and the clinic. My dad wasn’t the Halcyon Herald’s founder, and he wasn’t a Halcyon native. He wasn’t even Dutch. In fact, his last name was decidedly English. But he had slowly won the town’s collective approval after ten long years of ownership. By then he was allowed to sip coffee with the Tante Anna’s Cafe crowd, where all local news truly began and ended. The shrewd retirees who sipped cup after cup of black coffee and who liked to say to my dad, “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much,” nicknamed him “van der Foxbourne” that tenth year. And that’s when he knew he was in the loop.
My parents had moved to Halcyon from South Dakota in 1972 when I was two. Dad, who had been the editor, but not the owner, of a little newspaper in a town north of Sioux Falls, bought the Halcyon Herald from Abe DeGroot. The DeGroot family had owned the paper since its inception
Halcyon sat on an expanse of prairie three hours northeast of Des Moines, two hours south of the Minnesota border and thou sands of miles away from the mother country of the Dutch immi grants who settled the town in the late 1800s. Its founders initially chose a fine Dutch name for the town, but the railroad owners couldn’t pronounce it—and since they owned more land than the settlers, the most educated of the railroad magnates changed it to Halcyon. The soothing name was supposed to attract newcomers so that the town would blossom and the railroad would make lots of money selling off its many parcels of land. But every child, and actually every adult, had to be told what “halcyon” meant. Young sters who thought the town was named after Hal Somebody were set straight at Halcyon Elementary School as soon as they were old enough to understand that there are lots of complicated words that have simple meanings. Adults who didn’t know that “halcyon” meant “peaceful and serene” found out as soon as they were brave enough to ask.
In its best days, Halcyon could meet every household need. It had at least one of everything essential to modern-day living. A bank. A hardware store. A factory. A hospital. A school. A library. A furniture store. A car dealership. A theater. Even a shoe-repair shop. There were half-a-dozen churches, four gas stations, three restaurants, two gift shops, and a drugstore. There were concerts in the park, community ice-cream socials where there was standing room only, and long lines to get theater tickets on Friday nights.
By 1982, however, the year my dad built the tree house, times had changed for small Midwest towns like Halcyon. The ease with which a person could make the trip to Cedar Falls, about an hour’s drive away, and even to Des Moines, changed the way Halcyon High School graduates chose a career. It changed the way their parents shopped. It even changed the way farmers farmed. The theater had long since closed, as had the furniture store, the shoe-repair shop, and two of the gas stations. The hospital had been downsized to a clinic. Typical headlines in the Halcyon Herald, my father’s newspaper, read, “School board discusses problem of declining enrollment” and “Corn prices fall again” and “Another downtown business closes its doors.”
But there were also good things happening at that time in Halcyon. It wasn’t all bad news. The town was still fiercely devoted to its high school’s sports teams. Retired farmers still met for coffee at the downtown cafe every morning at nine o’clock. The churches were still full on Sundays. There were still old businesses on Main Street like Delft Delights, as well as new ones, like Denny’s Movie Rentals. The paint factory was still hiring people. And the grain elevator at the edge of town had added a new metal storage bin that glistened like a mammoth tin can in the Iowa sunshine.
The town still had its newspaper, which was deemed by all as just as necessary to the town’s survival as the school and the clinic. My dad wasn’t the Halcyon Herald’s founder, and he wasn’t a Halcyon native. He wasn’t even Dutch. In fact, his last name was decidedly English. But he had slowly won the town’s collective approval after ten long years of ownership. By then he was allowed to sip coffee with the Tante Anna’s Cafe crowd, where all local news truly began and ended. The shrewd retirees who sipped cup after cup of black coffee and who liked to say to my dad, “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much,” nicknamed him “van der Foxbourne” that tenth year. And that’s when he knew he was in the loop.
My parents had moved to Halcyon from South Dakota in 1972 when I was two. Dad, who had been the editor, but not the owner, of a little newspaper in a town north of Sioux Falls, bought the Halcyon Herald from Abe DeGroot. The DeGroot family had owned the paper since its inception
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