Amy Lu's View

After Chad and I graduated from college, we packed our bags, and headed off to…Iowa. 

Yeah, sometimes I wish we had ventured off to someplace considered more exciting and glamorous, and that we had spent our youth being slightly more adventurous. 

But Iowa was good to us. (And, if I had lived somewhere farther away from my ancestral home in Wisconsin, my mom and dad wouldn’t have been able to visit us as often as they did, and as it turns out, I didn’t have that many years left to spend with my mom before she died). 

Iowa was a land of firsts for us–the first time we lived together, where we got our first pet (our dearly departed cat Rogue), where we first watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” tv show, first used the interwebs, and had our first (and probably last) maid rite sandwich. I think we had our first pizza with artichokes in Iowa (Chad was not a fan). 

We had a lot of beginnings in Iowa. I started walking regularly, which eventually led to me running. I went to graduate school at the University of Iowa and got my Master’s in Library Science, and had my first library job and did my first story times at the Cedar Rapids Public Library. Chad went to Law School. We got engaged in Iowa. 

We knew some lovely people in Iowa, including our landlord and landlady, who owned the little house we rented next door to them. We drank our landlord’s homemade wine with them, and he comforted me when my dead Stanza got towed by explaining the vehicle circle of life to me (it was off to the scrapyard).

We lived in Iowa for 4 and a half years (briefly in Marion and the rest of the time in Cedar Rapids). These are just a few of the sweet and funny and silly memories I have of Iowa, so I’m throwing myself into National Iowa Day with enthusiastic nostalgia.