Trenkle: The size of small town Iowa | Features | telegraphherald.com – telegraphherald.com

The last street going west here, leaning like a plank rolling toward the next small Iowa town, is named Broadway.

And if in a fit of sarcasm one would consider Broadway as a trail in Manhattan, the New York street of song and fame, one would miss the geese that squawk 50 yards away, gliding like little sailboats on Lake Norman, a tiny pond listlessly spilling into the marsh water headed to the river.

The outhouse and windmill rising from a 10-foot-wide island are stammering signals that its Iowa, after all.

Here is a barely remembered town, yet alive in stature and warmth. Its small Lenox College once occupied a co-ed community that educated its students through the Presbyterian tradition. It opened during the Civil War era and closed during the beginnings of the second war. Its buildings still stand. A Civil War monument still harkens.

Its a town of Iowa churches and trees that block internet signals, of large garages and small clapboard houses and neighbors who wave at strangers as if to welcome them home.

The main street once held grocery stores, dry goods, meat purveyors, a Farmers State Bank, drug stores and a variety that bespeaks prosperity of spirit.

For more than two blocks in length, brick-and-mortar and wood built by industry still stands against the winds of time that claw away at the proud old facade.

In Hopkinton, a burg of hundreds that rests on U.S. 38, somewhere in the trajectory of geese and autos heading to other spaces, the utilities office clerk smiles as warmly as the sun, cleaning shadow away and offering an authentic heartfelt concern, with a Welcome. How do you do?

A few blocks off U.S. 38, a trek south of the famous Dyersville film iconography and a short stop between Delhi and Monticello, a post office clerk seems to have heeded the greeting at the utilities office, like townsfolk have studied lines to beguile visitors.

Heres your post office key. Welcome. Glad youre here.

Now, the nearby space where morning doves gather in tree tops, grows into a chorus to compete and to echo the clacking fury of the geese two blocks farther along, as it confronts harmony from the inhabitants, a rhythm of life Thorton Wilder or Steinbeck would have found joyful to show.

In this telling, the genuine friend is that person who starts with a warm, Glad to meet you. And means it. Perhaps the preacher Casey from The Grapes of Wrath passed through. And despite the towns effort, hard times did come. But resilience and kindness stand out, markedly real in the buildings, homes and civility at every introduction.

At the library, the young woman behind the glass, at a spot near the old bank tellers window, smiles as sure as the migration of the pond folk. Every time you enter the book aisles and look across to her, she grins with a knowledge of its return in the Golden Rule.

The face of the building proclaims the glory of farms and the heritage of a bank, its red brick and marble face a soothing memory of days past. Yet, in an instant, history is alive in a current generation. Again, that refrain as stout as old glory, as deep as the sweet land of liberty that was carved in unique colonnades across the faces of town.

Here, affixed naturally upon the faces of the residents, the laughter of the children and as sure as the smell of spring drafting into small-town Iowa, grows humanist and humanness.

Its a place of earth and connection, memory and a still hearty faith, given in the Welcome and the hand that passes the key at the post office, not far from the field, the river and the lake of a singular acre, where the horizon holds out to eternity.

Trenkle has had a career teaching psychology. He authored the book, The Kings of the Narrow Gate, about an evangelical mission within a pawn shop in Dubuque. His family traces back to the 19th century in Dubuque, when a relative operated a meat shop, Trenkles Sausages, once located next to city hall.

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Trenkle: The size of small town Iowa | Features | telegraphherald.com - telegraphherald.com