Excerpt from my current reading

"Perhaps no one is as vulnerable to the lure of England's many-layered past as a young American reader who has grown up under the wide empty skies of the Midwest. To me, the Midwest was almost featureless, compared, for instance, with New England, home of the House of the Seven Gables, or to the myth-ridden Far West. Nothing in Ames [Iowa] seemed historic or even very old. If a building did age, it was eventually renovated beyond recognition or else torn down. If I had known where to stand and how to listen, somewhere in Ames I might have been able to catch an echo from the past of the heavy rumble of wagon wheels on a prairie schooner heading west. But history seemed to have vanished from Iowa. In England, it was still alive."

--My Love Affair With England by Susan Allen Toth, published 1992