Made a quick stop in Iowa City for a night last weekend. I have to say it was the most refreshing trip out of Chicago I think I’ve made thus far. Could’ve had a lot to do with the lovely weather (it was about 78 degrees last weekend), and Iowa being a much more lush and bright state in July than it is in April, when I was there last.

The minute we crossed the border from Illinois, Nick, who was driving, got to going about how much he loved Iowa.

“You can literally tell the difference between Iowa and Illinois crossing the river,” he said. “It’s so much more beautiful over here. Everything’s alive. The hills are rolling. It’s just … more comfortable. I miss it.”

I agreed with him. I missed my home state on this day. It all looked … like home. I felt like I belonged. I wanted to pull the car over and just lie on my back in the grass and look at the big sky.

Of course, I pointed it out to Nick that we held the state with such reverence because we were no longer living there. It’s easy, especially in the summer, and when you currently reside in a bustling city, to look back at the small place your spent your simple college days and long for them. The truth is, we were both absolutely ready to leave Iowa City when we did. I didn’t want to spend another month there back in the summer of 2001. We looked back on it with romanticism, but if we were still back in Iowa City we’d be bitching about how we’d rather be living in Chicago.

The grass is always greener.

He agreed. Neither of us wanted to be spending our weekends hopping from Jake’s, The Brothers and Joe’s in our late twenties anymore. Chicago was home, and deep down we knew this.

But once we got there, there were moments that you truly missed the simple life. I’d walk by houses with a heavily wooded yard that stretched acres, and quiet streets where the only noise is the lady across the street tending to the garden, where children played freely in the streets. It was all so peaceful. I was envious.

But I also had to take into account that the tranquility of Iowa City was part of the reason I had to leave the place. It’s just too easy to live there. There’s no struggle. No sense of reality. Iowa City is the closest thing to a utopia I’ve ever lived in, and I started to resent that over the years. Nothing bad ever happens there. The town is progressive and tolerant. Almost everybody’s got a college education. There’s little poverty (mostly just the students), and even less crime. And it’s almost exclusively white.

Obviously, this isn’t reality. As much as I love Iowa City, I feel much more inspired in Chicago. In Chicago you see real life everyday. You see minorities. You see poor people. Every day you come across a scene where you come to the realization of how imperfect a place the world is. The closest thing to an unsettling moment you get in Iowa City is a downtown fight between two meathead frat boys.

On some levels I understand why it’s such a great writer town, but in other respects I don’t. Sure, the rent is cheap, you don’t need a car, and there’s a great talent pool to associate yourself with. But there’s never any sort of struggle. It’s such a simple life. How could it ever be inspiring? It seems the only thing you’d be capable of writing in Iowa City is how beautiful the world is.

But maybe that’s just me.

I stayed with my buddy Tieg, who’s carved out a nice life for himself in the ten years he’s lived there. He took me to a dinner party with some friends of his in the historic part of town. It was a little different talking with Iowa City people as opposed to Chicago people. Everything was more laid-back. The children were playing carefree in the yard. The neighborhood was dead still. People were just relaxing. No worries. No time constraints. It was like the scene from a Norman Rockwell painting.

My life in the big city has sort of conditioned me to look at this lifestyle as overly simplistic. Or to think that what I was doing with my life had more depth and importance than what these people were doing, just because I lived in a metropolitan area. But as I sat on the porch of that crickety old home (that likely cost a fraction of what one just like it would cost in Chicago) I felt a little ping of yearning for that way of life again.