But people definitely don’t live in Iowa City for the weather. They live here for the schools, which are pretty good, and for the neighborhoods, which are pretty safe. They stay for the friends they make, who lend you sugar when you’re short and come help you pound nails into a kids’ tree house when they see you working on it. Even my stylish friends like the relative lack of attitude, the non-existent “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality that can afflict suburbanites in terms of car and house size and urbanites in terms of the labels on their blue jeans and sunglasses.
An infusion of decent restaurants in the past decade and a humming little food co-op—where a hunk of Reggiano and a fillet of Copper River salmon can be found, should you desire such things—have upped the civility factor. There are writers galore, thanks to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and one of the best bookstores in the country, Prairie Lights. The array of movies leaves a lot to be desired, but that’s why Netflix was invented.
There are clearly enough people who agree with me about the star power of Iowa City to build large houses on the outskirts of town. The cornfields and pastures, still only a five -minute drive in any direction, are giving way to housing developments. Who is buying these mini mansions? It makes me sad to see these lands eaten up by sprawl. I wonder whether I’d care less if I lived in a place to which I was less attached.
I watched the old fruit and flower market give way to a strip mall. It’s where we got our sweet corn in the summer—call in advance and they’d have a baker’s dozen ready with your name on the bag—and Christmas trees in the winter, complete with a free ornament. Now I buy my plants at the grocery store. The pharmacy with a lunch counter and soda fountain in back, the one where I got chocolate malts after having my braces tightened, closed just after my daughter was born. These days I drive through Walgreen’s to pick up a prescription.
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