I’m back home in Chapel Hill after my shortened stay in DeKalb. I’m glad I went, happy to be connected with family and friends, amazed by the vibrancy of Chicago and awed by the beauty of the Illinois farm lands.
The DeKalb hotel in which I stayed was across the street from the first apartment that my mother and brothers and I moved to in 1984. When I lived there, there was no hotel but instead a 100-acre soybean field farmed by Jerry Montavon, the brother-in-law of my uncle Stoddard Allen. Uncle Jerry hired me one summer to walk the rows with a hoe and take out rogue weeds.
In the mistersugar archives, I’ve just found this post I wrote in 2005 after I read Calvin Trillin’s essay about the DeKalb County farmland and mentality. “No bid deal” is right.
On my way out of town this morning, I drove past the duplex in which our family lived for most of our time in DeKalb. Then north, through town, to Sycamore for coffee at the Coffee Rosters Collective, north past more farm houses and corn and soybeen, to the tollway that returned me to busy O’Hare Airport and my flight home.
© Anton Zuiker