No, it's Iowa.

We arrived here about 7:00, after a leisurely drive across the Land of Lincoln. I love this drive-- I really do. When our usual path to see family takes us around/through the City with Big Shoulders and Excellent Taste in Pastors I clench with every clenchable body part until we get around the numerous construction zones. I love that city, I really do, but I love it from the train or the back seat of a cab, not with my hands white-knuckling the steering wheel.

But, ah! The undulating greens and stark barn reds of southern Snow Belt/northern Land of Lincoln on a summer afternoon. It's a pleasure to just follow that shimmering black ribbon along until we meet the Great Big River.

We went straight to the nursing home to see Sturdy Grandmother. Since I have become a bit of a nursing home expert over the past two years, I was trying to prepare my husband and daughter for what they would find once we got there.

Sturdy Grandmother, raised in Indiana, college-educated before such a thing was common, married a jazz musician of all things-- a preacher's kid at that. When he broke his jaw in a bar fight one night, his mouth was forever destroyed for the clarinet, and he needed to find a new gig. He became a "rag man", working in the fashion industry in sales, and retail management. He was president of Montomery Ward next, then Spiegel, then he retired from the rag trade to start a little insurance and investment company in Omaha, Nebraska (not the one you're thinking, of, though.)

All the while, she had two children, whom she packed up and moved from Omaha to Winnetka to Scarsdale, to Cleveland, back to New York, and to Iowa, among other places. She set up house, enrolled the kids in school, hired the household help, hostessed the company parties, was Girl Scout Leader, went to the formal President's Circle gala every year, helped with the homework and on, and on, and on.

Years later, when her oldest grandson brought a skinny tall teenage girl with big hair to the family reunion in southern Indiana, she was the first one of the family besides the charming grandson, to be nice to me. I love her dearly.

It was difficult to see her laying in that bed today, so tiny. My image of her is that of Queen of Her Kitchen, in charge of the home. Now her every need is taken care of by kind aides, who do not know her story like I do, who cannot possibly appreciate all that this woman has accomplished in her life.

I wish somebody would have prepared me.