Where Did The Building Go?

    

        I moved to rural Iowa from Phoenix, Arizona the summer of 2003.  Once there I realized I had a bad case of culture shock.  The town we moved to had a population of 800 people and the majority of them lived out on the surrounding farms.

        Being a city girl all of my life I had no clue what I was supposed to do in a small town in the middle of nowhere.  I even had to look at a map to see where Iowa was before moving there.  I was use to having a variety of stores and bars to choose from on every street corner; but not in this small town.

        The grocery store was the size of a Circle K and it was filled with things I’ve never even heard of before.  There meat section was a butcher who cut your meat to order.  They didn’t have the meat pre-packaged for your convenience you had to ask the butcher even for a pound of ground beef.

        There wasn’t even a bar in town, only a bowling alley which was open odd hours and odd days of the week.  The pharmacy reminded me of the Andy Griffith Show where the old ladies went to gossip, but hey they delivered.

        The one thing I could never wrap my head around was the elevator that sat at the end of Main Street.  I was always curious about what happened to the building around it and why they left the elevator there standing all alone.

        After I had lived there for awhile and had made some friends I finally felt comfortable enough to ask about the building.  My biggest fear was that it had come tumbling down in a horrific tragedy, my over active imagination at work again.

        So I mustered up the courage and finally asked, “What happened to the building at the end of Main Street?”

        “What building Lysa?” my friend asked.

        “The one that the elevator belonged to,” was my response.

        Everyone erupted into an uncontrollable laughter for what seemed like an eternity, and then my friend said, “Lysa, it’s a grain elevator.  It’s where the farmers store their grain.”

        I felt like a complete idiot but started laughing at myself and said, “Where I come from they are used to take you up and down the floors of a building.”  Needless to say for the next four years, until I moved back to Arizona, I was constantly teased about the elevator without a building at the end of Main Street.

©2014 Lysa Wilds