Attribution: kallerna, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, indulges the keeper as he reviews the system of immigration that stole the country from the Native Americans and got everyone where they are today, specifically how some of the keeper’s predecessors filtered through Iowa, and one—a favorite uncle, even went back there for a career in the Iowa cattle industry.
Of those predecessors who stayed in Iowa, not a lot is known but the keeper remembers as a child, summer visits by a series of outspoken female Iowa relatives who set the Wisconsin clan on its ear on into the fall. (“Outspoken” may be an exercise in restraint.)
The keeper also does not know about the extent of his shirttail relatives’ affiliation with the traditional strong Iowa attachment to God and pigs. (Pigs outnumber people 7-1 in Iowa.)
It is entirely possible, of course, that the keeper shares genetic material with some Evangelical Christian Republican Iowa pig farmers, who recently braved the winter cold to put their blessings for national leadership on a philandering narcissistic wholesale liar.
It is probably just as well that such information is never detailed, the keeper being a hopeless Wisconsin liberal who relates to pigs only through a bacon connection and argues with God.
Photo by Bill Stokes