Even in the midst of a midwinter storm when scattered piles of white slide across my driveway and down my rural road and when the wind snaps brittle tree branches, I remember that first return. Summer images, recorded decades ago, are cloudless.

Coils‚ green, yellow and red‚ ?speed down the line; wires wrapped in color that I carefully dip into a hot pot of wax. My clothes are crusted with circles, which I peel from my pants each night. Within the Connecticut Audio Dynamics Factory, machines, voices of authority, and chatter between stations manned by women briefly interrupt the incessant loop of top-forty music that repeats itself for eight and a half hours. I await the 15-minute break; I think about Iowa City.

"It's the coldest place on earth," I'd said to my brother who lived in Oswego, a blizzard-ridden town that abuts Lake Ontario. Even for an upstater like me, who'd skied down the icy Adirondacks, my first December on the plains seemed monstrous. By the end of spring, when I could afford only breakfast charged to my university bill, I considered abandoning the frigid landscape.

Even in the midst of a midwinter storm when scattered piles of white slide across my driveway and down my rural road and when the wind snaps brittle tree branches, I remember that first return. Summer images, recorded decades ago, are cloudless.

Coils‚ ?green, yellow and red‚ ?speed down the line; wires wrapped in color that I carefully dip into a hot pot of wax. My clothes are crusted with circles, which I peel from my pants each night. Within the Connecticut Audio Dynamics Factory, machines, voices of authority, and chatter between stations manned by women briefly interrupt the incessant loop of top-forty music that repeats itself for eight and a half hours. I await the 15-minute break; I think about Iowa City.

"It's the coldest place on earth," I'd said to my brother who lived in Oswego, a blizzard-ridden town that abuts Lake Ontario. Even for an upstater like me, who'd skied down the icy Adirondacks, my first December on the plains seemed monstrous. By the end of spring, when I could afford only breakfast charged to my university bill, I considered abandoning the frigid landscape.

"You'll need to get all 'A's' to get any money," the department chair had told me, and I did, so that summer when the Audio Dynamics bell rang and the line briefly shut down, I called him.

"Where are you?" he asked, as factory clatter filtered through the phone. When I explained, he fell silent. "There's a teaching assistantship available, but it's only for the first semester."

Early morning the following Thursday, too early for factory work, I boarded a crowded commuter train with my green duffel bag, canvas backpack and jean jacket. Dumped onto a long platform in Grand Central at 7:30, I walked across the street to the LaGuardia bus stop where cars, cabs, people and a humid August day folded in around me.

I released a smile only after the plane had landed in Cedar Rapids, when I was swallowed up by rows of crops and friends who raced east towards the Mississippi River. In the evening as we sat on a fractured concrete wall, we cast out fine blue fishing lines into the darkening water. The sun set behind us without a nibble, but when I caught sight of the barge‚ lights that brightened down an iron side as the engine sent splashes of water towards my feet‚ ?my memory became photographic. I flipped from a morning to an evening print, from a chaotic Grand Central to a composed Mississippi, and I was illuminated. Like a shed skin, I peeled away the summer and floated the summer sights and sounds south towards St. Louis, a tumble of troubles that I deep-sixed.

"I'm staying on this side of the river, forever," I stated, a promise that wasn't kept. Years and a degree later, I moved to New York, the Twin Cities and again, Connecticut. Yet always when in doubt, when life forced a change, I returned to Iowa. Even after my last foray to Texas, when I'd retreated from success along the north/south route in my little red sports car, cats in the back, friend in the front, I marked home by the number of miles it took me to place myself between the Missouri and the Mississippi.

My last arrival in early October I was greeted by golden fields. I rolled in all directions during the twenty-mile drive from an I-80 exit to my new Kalona home, as my friend inhaled the hogs and horses while tractors and buggies scrolled across the windshield.

"Why would anyone ever leave here?" she commented, after we surveyed my new Amish neighbor's garden‚ ?the autumnal lines of fat, fresh vegetables and fruits.

And like the first return, the last one has ended in a promise. When road ice keeps me housebound, when summer skies blister the back of my neck, I try to retrieve the evening snapshot of the Mississippi from my mental scrapbook. I dredge up that image of a brilliant barge and relax, remind myself of the first return and renew my commitment to a place and space just west of the Mississippi.