Sioux City, Iowa

The stench of the stockyards
always let you know
you were getting
close to home.

The Missouri River sparkled
and swirled along I-29
like a brown velvet ribbon.
It led you into the center of town.

How many times had that river
overrun its banks,
filling buildings and basements
with mud and sludge?
No sandbags could stop it.

I remember the Flood of 1952.
I stood on a high hill with my Dad
and watched downtown Sioux City
sink into that muddy river.

That was the year of the polio epidemic.
You couldn’t go to the swimming pool.
Everyone was supposed to stay home;
otherwise, you might end up in an iron lung.

This town had struggled to save itself.
The inner city had a brief renaissance,
but the mall did it in.
It’s pretty much deserted now.

When I was a kid,
we used to take the streetcar into town.
We went to the movies at the Capital Theater
or shopping at Younkers Department Store.
They’re both gone now.

Central High School had been converted
to apartments.
Low income housing, I understand.
This was the Castle on the Hill
where I went to school.


The neighborhood around St. Thomas Episcopal Church
was littered with junk cars and graffiti.
Parishioners from the North side of town
would no longer worship here.
They were afraid to come.

The big Victorian homes along Jackson Street
were still standing.
People still lived in them but
the “Painted Ladies” looked tired,
in need of a face lift.

I sprinkled Dad’s ashes
under the mulberry bush in the yard
of the house where my mother was born
and my parents were married.

I sprinkled them under five trees
in the yards of five houses
where my father lived
during his 91 years in this town.

I sprinkled his ashes
at St. Thomas Episcopal Church.
I buried them in two cemeteries,
alongside each of his wives.

I threw his ashes up in the air
and let the wind carry them
all the way to the Missouri River
as I drove out of town.