Two things are notable when driving through Iowa.

The first one is of course the corn fields. Iowa ranks first in the country in corn production. They make up for almost 20 % of all the corn in America. It has to grow somewhere, and if you’re off the freeways, that’s about the only thing you find.

The second things are the graveyards. For long stretches of time, corn fields is the only thing you see, every now and then interrupted by silos. And graveyards. They appear depressingly often, in the middle of the corn, far away from the closest church or town. The farmers of Iowa who lived among the corn and now rest in it. My own theory is that the gravestones are what’s left when small communities and family farms were swallowed by industrial agriculture and bigger cities; sometimes as many as fifty, sometimes as few as six. You see them, you blink, they’re gone again.