Pearl of the Mississippi

(This has been sitting in my drafts for almost 3 months so I guess it can finally be published here)

Shells

I grew up in a small farming community in Muscatine, Iowa. Unless you’re exceptionally fond of corn, it’s not much to look at, and there’s even less to do when you’re a kid. That doesn’t change the fact that I loved it there, and miss it all the time. The town itself is rich with history; it’s located on the Mississippi River and is perhaps most famous for being the ‘pearl button capital of the world’.
Where I spent my childhood - on our own little slice of Highway 61 - it wasn't uncommon to root around in the back yard and unearth mussel shells riddled with holes where buttons had been punched out of them. Behind our house was a murky, putrid-smelling “river” that we all referred to as “the slough” - the backwaters of the Mississippi. That was the source of these mysterious shells. Factories would punch as many buttons out of a shell as possible, then dump them back into the water. Traveling down the river, some would inevitably find their way to my back yard. 

The shells themselves weren’t of any value (monetarily speaking), but holding them made you feel special. You were literally holding a piece of your town’s history! Imagining how many years they’d spent buried in the mud waiting to be discovered and appreciated again always depressed me. 

People often made fun of our “cow town”, but I was proud to be a Muscatinian. I was proud of our unique history, proud of the things that made my town special! We did things differently, and I embraced it.

My family celebrated the fourth of July the way you were supposed to in Iowa: by snacking on a fat slice of locally grown watermelon (made even more delicious with a generous sprinkling of salt). See, that’s the other thing we Muskies were known for - our watermelon. You knew summer had officially started in Muscatine when you began seeing trucks with wooden beds STUFFED full of watermelons. There were at least 3 fruit stands a short distance from my house, and each year, people flocked to them (even coming from other states!) to buy a “Muscatine Melon”.

And don’t get me started about our corn obsession, either. The word is practically synonymous with Iowa. Well, with the midwest as a whole, really! But especially Iowa. if you couldn’t answer “what’s knee high by the fourth of July?” you weren’t a true Iowan.

I may legally be a resident of Alabama, but my heart still lives in Muscatine, Iowa. I hope someday to return, even if just briefly. It'll always be special to me.