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“And I remember Muscatine -still more pleasantly  - for its summer sunset. I have never seen any on either side of the ocean that equaled them.”  Samuel Clemens in his younger years when he worked for Muscatine Journal and before he took the pen name, Mark Twain

A sentimental feeling comes over me when I ponder my youth,
growing up in the small city of Muscatine, Iowa.

Iowa – where rainbows arch over verdant fields of swaying stalks of corn,
painting their pretty pastels in blue summer skies.

Iowa – where many rolling hills and where bluffs break the monotony
of the lengthy flat terrain of Iowa’s surrounding sister states.

Iowa – the only state where two long rivers run along the opposite sides of it.
I grew up on the eastern side, seeing the great Mississippi nearly daily
as it rolled its way down to New Orleans – that same southern city where
my hero, a young Abraham Lincoln, got his first view of the cruelty 
of slavery, seeing Africans ripped from loved ones and sold at auction.

Iowa -  of whose heritage I am proud, for their underground railroad helped bring slaves farther north to freedom in either Minnesota or in Canada.

Iowa -  whose flag with broad vertical stripes of symbolic red, white and blue
displays the slogan “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.”

Iowa – where lunch is called dinner and dinner is called supper, and whose bounties are plentiful at Thanksgiving time and where hogs and cattle 
are the creatures that predominate the beautiful rural landscape.

Even prouder am I of having grown up in Muscatine City, where the old bridge
was exploded in the year of my graduation to make way
 for the new bridge, beautifully lit up at night, which crosses over into Illinois.

Muscatine, named by the ancient Indians whose bodies lie buried in mounds
across the state and also in a large park of my city where we frolicked in summer and where in winter, we ice skated on its large frozen pond.

I changed my destiny when I moved west for college. 
Although I enjoy my valley home flanked by a range of mountains,
I would still prefer to look upon a Muscatine sunset 
and see fireflies begin to flicker around me as twilight deepens into night;
to smell the scent of lilac; to savor the juiciest of all watermelons 
that I ever tasted in my life; and to feel myself again 
in rhythm with the flow of the mighty Mississippi.
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