By David Snowball
Dear friends,
A Tale of Two Cities
Nominally Chip and I reside in the Quad Cities, whose t-shirts describe them as “twice as nice as the Twin Cities.” It’s a lovely and surprisingly diverse urban area with about 450,000 people and an agglomeration of two dozen small cities and towns. Half of us reside in Illinois, just south of the Mississippi River, and half in Iowa, on the river’s north bank.
The Mississippi River actually flows from east to west here. Recently, though, it has been flowing east, west, north, south, and, more than occasionally, up. As I write, the Mississippi is cresting at 22′, about five feet above the level at which we declare a major flood. People in Davenport take notice. That’s one Continue reading →