I had thought Iowa was going to be a fair bit cooler than Southern Indiana. It's probably true, but I certainly didn't mind so much today when I looked at the thermometer and it read 63. I went on a really nice long walk and took off my sweater within minutes.
I'm increasingly struck by Grinnell every time I return. Most of my friends complain about how tiny Bloomington is, but then they've never been to small-town Iowa. I was walking for close to an hour in the early afternoon, and I could almost count on two hands the number of moving vehicles I passed, which made it wonderfully quiet. I really enjoy that, though not so much that I miss it when I'm in Bloomington.
I do miss the look of Iowa sometimes, though. Southern Indiana is beautiful, there's no question, but somehow Iowa's beauty seems more profound. Maybe it's the flatness and thus the sense of largeness: you can see why it was once considered an ocean of grass, in which one might drown. I think it also has to do with the population density and the level of build-up along the roads. I can't think of anything in Iowa analogous to SR 37, leading from Bloomington to Indianapolis, with its packed traffic, ugly intersections (admittedly interspersed with some pretty woods), and progressive build-up. Things just feel more spread-out here, more self-sufficient.
It's a particularly striking landscape now, with snow left in all the shadows, and with the results of the recent "[ice] storm of the century" (to quote Alliant Energy) still all around. Some of the blocks that have been less attended to by clean-up crews have mid-sized hedges of stacked fallen branches lining the length of the road, and the evergreens lining the back of our yard are bent over and pointing every which-way.
I wish I could post pictures, but I left my camera in Bloomington, and mom and dad's is in the shop. Oh well.