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Iowa Hall of Pride netINS, Inc. Butler House on Grand B&B Sam's Barber Shop Breitbach's Country Dining Douglas T. Bates III, Attorney KMA Radio's ''Chuck & Don Show'' The Monks of New Melleray Abbey
How the donut man from Bunkers Dunkers in Jefferson helped land RAGBRAI XXXVI for an overnight stop here!
Our hometown of  What’s the deal with the black & white saddle shoes?  Click here for the story of our farm in Greene County, Iowa. Here's looking at life at Simple Serenity Farm  Carla Offenburger got the lawn work season started Sunday, April 20. We saw rhubarb and lilac bushes budding, but the bad news is that we realized we must have the three ugliest trees in Greene County. Click here for larger format Earlier photos in this series 
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The route for the 2008 RAGBRAI -- that's the Des Moines Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa -- includes our Greene County seat of Jefferson as an overnight stop on Monday, July 21. An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people will be in Jefferson that night. Read the amazing story here about a chance encounter three years ago in Florida, where our vacationing local donut king Randy Bunkers warmly greeted a stranger who was wearing a RAGBRAI T-shirt. The fellow happened to be RAGBRAI director T.J. Juskiewicz -- and now, hurrah! RAGBRAI is coming our way!
There’s the annual Cooper Prom (for all ages), concerts, basketball, suppers, ice cream socials and people coming through all the time on the Raccoon River Valley Trail. Here is the story on the little community in Greene County, Iowa, that is now home for the Offenburgers.
What's Carla Reading?
“Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl,” by Carol Bodensteiner (2008) What a nice, quiet read this book is. It was what you’d expect from an Iowa farm girl. It felt comfortable – as most books that have to do with growing up in the charmed Iowa countryside do. It made me wish that I, too, would have grown up in a similar way. But, alas, I’m a city girl. And that’s why I had to read “Growing Up Country.” It is a past I do not have, but something I have longed for at different times in my life. The best my family did for “country living” on the south side of Des Moines was have a septic tank, hang clothes on the line, plant a backyard garden and live on a gravel road for much of my childhood before the city got it paved. So, Carol Bodensteiner’s “Growing Up Country” was an enjoyable read for me. The author grew up outside of Maquoketa in eastern Iowa, and her story is filled with typical farmyard antics, livestock, 4-H and farmer lore. All of it good, of course. And that is also a fault of the book – it’s all warm and fuzzy, if you don’t count the daily dramas of having livestock and the yearly struggles with 4-H projects. Eventually warm and fuzzy, nice and sweet, can put a reader to sleep. I found that happening a few times in “Growing Up Country” – and yet I’m glad I read it. In all honesty, Bodensteiner, grew up a lot like me. Even the photo on the inside dedication page could be a photo of my family in the same time period. I swear I had the same dress she is wearing. So did our mothers, I think. That photo could have been me and my sisters with my parents on the south side of Des Moines – even the car looked familiar. But I was always puzzled with the time frame of Bodensteiner’s life. The only date I recall being mentioned in the book was the year her parents got married, 1942. But that wasn’t enough for me. I need more dates in a memoir, more ways to make connections. Since I received “Growing Up Country” with an accompanying page of biography on Bodensteiner, I did know she was born in 1948, in Maquoketa. But she should have let her readers know that, too. Overall, Bodensteiner’s idyllic childhood of chores, school, 4-H, church and family seems to have been charming for all those living it. I mean really, Bodensteiner even made the chores sound fun and family friendly. The book was easy to enjoy, too. - Carla Offenburger Now reading“Making a Difference: 182 ½ Ways to Change the World,” by Deborah Naybor (2003). Most recently reviewed “Boomsday,” by Christopher Buckley (2007). It’s indeed a crooked political world that Buckley creates – and one that would be even funnier, if occasionally, I didn’t find myself saying, “Wait a minute, this sounds a bit too close to reality, or at least plausible.” “The Firm,” by John Grisham (1991). “The Firm” did all it needed to do that I will most likely pick up Grisham again, when I need a quick thriller in which I can easily forget my real life and get lost in the fast pace of any Grisham novel. “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life,” by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp (2007). I savored it. Every paragraph, every page. “Whose Names are Unknown,” by Sanora Babb (2004) This is a similar story to John Steinbeck’s classic “The Grapes of Wrath,” both of them novels about a family in the years of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and Great Depression – and written at about the same time. Alas, Steinbeck’s hit the presses first, and Babb’s didn’t get to the presses until 2004. But Babb’s story may well be the better, and more powerful, of the two. “Dreams from My Father,” by Barack Obama (1995). I found myself favorably comparing Obama’s writing – and his story – to the works of W.E. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. All of these authors have written and shared their experiences in words that angered, aggravated, motivated, inspired, moved and changed their people, and their time. Their work has, decades later, served to educate their readers’ views of our shared history. Obama does this very same thing in “Dreams from My Father.” Comments from you readers Beth Ginger, Omaha, Nebraska: “I have just finished a book that has evoked some strange feelings – one that makes me think about the characters and wonder what might have happened to them, more so than any other book I have read. The title is ‘Suite Francaise’ by Irene Nemirovsky.” You can write me with comments on my reviews or your own thoughts on books at carla@Offenburger.com.
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