So we can't just start writing about the Midwest willy-nilly. There needs to be some kind of guidelines.  As a midwesterner myself, I have found that the term "midwest" is used to cover a very large mass of land with many variances in terrain and population - a bit too many if you ask me. I'm going to try to break it into zones:

Someone from Ohio is more Midwestern than someone from Minnesota because people from Minnesota are in their own category. Just as people in Chicago consider themselves more a part of the cosmopolitan MidEast, then too, should Michigan (my birthplace) consider itself part of the Mideast- we are, after all, on eastern time. But anyone that has been to Ohio will tell you that while further east than Michigan, they are more like Iowa (true Midwesterners) than they are like Wisconsin - another state in its own zone. Throw in southern Indiana and eastern Missouri and you are practically talking about the south - I will call it the "Top South" because it isn't quite MidSouth - but I'll save the zones of the south for that page.

The zones will be our working outline. Zone One: The common Midwest, Zone Two: Wisconsin and The UP of Michigan (aka: The Pastie/Dairy Zone), Zone Three: Minnesota (The End of The Great River Zone), Zone Four: Chicago area (The Hot Dog/Architecture Zone), and Zone Five: The Top South

I hope that this springs debate and contraversy. I can already argue that Michigan, and I mean both of those beautiful penninsulas should be in its own Lake Zone...

The Yes M!ch!gan Map!

Oh, I remember when soft drinks used to come with maps. I remember a couple weeks ago, sundown in the deep south, when my Verizon Wireless Navigator was bugging out on us and we had to use last years atlas to get us back on the highway.

In case you haven’t caught some of my previous posts - I love maps. I love maps of malls, museums, battlegrounds, college campuses, and airports. I have a habit of saving them and it makes for a cluttered life. I would scan and put them in digital storage but you know how small scanner beds are and how big maps can be.

This has been a lifelong interest and I find that like wine, maps get better with age. Think old globes, think USSR, think colonialism.

I like the idea that something we see as a factual reference document can turn to a piece of radical disinformation in a matter of years.

Just look at THIS MAP JACKPOT OF A SITE  and see how people used to think California was an island. I think we may rediscover that they were right in 2012.

What I really like is to combine my map obsession with my commitment to snail mail so I am always on the lookout for postcard maps. I found this postcard at a BP in Indiana recently:

Apparently it is from The Hoosier Heritage Quilt. I found that out at Indiana University’s Historic Maps of Indiana Site.  Cool, huh?

I guess you have to be a map nerd.

I’d like to have a camera covering the low road because I pretty much have the high road under control. I am able to take pictures, text, administer eye drops, and sharpen pencils while driving.

I was in Northern Indiana by the time the sun started to come up and turn Muncie into a setting straight out of a Dutch landscape (or an Enya CD cover):

There is no other way to see the midwest farm country. I know this because I grew up there and all the farmers got up early not just because it is a good time to milk cows but because it looks cool.

And it is all about looks in the end. It was a little over a year ago in Badwater Basin when Bethany and I discovered our true vocational calling, capturing sunsets in our hearts. Sunrises are sunsets somewhere so these count too:

Roadkill to hippy in one entry. I’m available for your next dinner party.

Fowlerville. The north view looks strikingly similar.

Made it to Fowlerville very late last night. What pleasure to drive out from under the trees of Midtown Memphis, through the sunflowers of east Arkansas and the purpled-flowered brush of lower Missouri and the pro-life signage of southern Illinois – punctuated by a forty-foot cross in Effingham (a rather funny name for a place with a huge cross– that is if people are pronouncing it like I am; EFF-in’HAM) and then a ramble onward through the flat gray roads of the only interstate highway system in the USA that has more Arby’s than McDonalds – Indiana, all just to be greeted by my favorite state sign of all time MICHIGAN: GREAT LAKES GREAT TIMES. Every time I drive under it I think, no DUH.

(photo from Arkansas)

I’ll be back in the Volunteer State soon. Until then…

Another day with the sis in West Mich. Tuliptime, Bison, Wooden Shoes, Swingsets on Lake Michigan, and millions of dead bugs and gallons of their guts on my windshield.

He’d already lingered too long, he was the cable guy, the mall cop in the movies, the boring cousin, the ex-con on day release.

We lost him during the first part of our tour and saved The White House in Miniature until the end of our museum visit, knowing that the sight of miniature things would make us pass out (as it does for most women) and we were working on a new Vistas Video when he came out of a dark corner, his voice again directed at K, “you have a pan-o-ram-ick camera?”

“Nope, we are very busy doing something extremely awesome with a regular camera.”

“You want to see the room where the Monica Lewinsky thing happened?” He points to a bottom corner office in the elaborate mini white house. Gross.

And then he hands us a brochure, “This is the last one from the back rooms. It’s from the 70s.”

This is the front and the back and an excerpt from a creepy color drawing inside that was placed between the LBJ and Nixon entries:

He watched us circle the house, this security guy, the miniature-ness was not making me feel like passing out because every time I tried to point something out to  K, like a hockey game live on a mini tv set, he, the security guy would comment on it. Every time I tried to take a picture of her and he’d say “Ha! That is a cool shot. You want to use your flash? You can you know, I will let you. You normally can’t.”

“No, that’s ok. I don’t need a flash.”

K tells me she saw him try to offer a small child some unpackaged skittles from his pocket and the kid refused and left the room.

He makes a few more Monica Lewinsky references.

You can hear him here a lil bit (try not to pass out from the mini-ness)

He finally asks us if we want our picture taken together. We agreed and stood in front of the miniature White House, looking like giant glamazons about to smash the nation’s capital. And he snaps one, looks at it and says, “Ooooh. It’s a little dark. I’m going to have to turn the flash on. It’s cool though. I can authorize it.” And zing, the flash goes off and he hands the camera back to us.

A sound comes from his shoulder and he leans into his security guard radio contraption and says, “No, it’s cool. I authorized it.” He looks at us, “they caught your flash,” and we are like ok, who gives a F and he says, “don’t worry, I told them I ok-ed it.”

“Thanks,” we said.

Now if this thirty year old exhibit wastes away from the decay-inducing light of harsh electronic flash bulbs, it should be known that it is this young security guard, suffering from boredom-induced borderline personality disorder, handing out authorizations to anybody. With people like him guarding our nation’s precious artifacts, who needs a Library of Congress or rules, or laws, or order?

I loved all the daffodils and tulips and hyacinths at the Meijer Gardens today but I especially liked the plants that feed off bug flesh.

Helping myself to seconds at the Dan Quayle Center, & The United States Vice Presidential Museum in Huntington, IN

Bought at Jesses James Museum in Stanton, MO. My sister and I got there a fully full two and a half hours before closing time but the four hundred pound store clerk and tour guide refused to let us in the Wax Museum part because she was closing up early to see the new episode of Big Brother.