One of the imams for the Cambridge mosque on Prospect Street lived a few blocks down from his mosque. I know because he grew corn in his 3’x8’ patch of earth in front of his house. My son and I would walk by on the way to pre-school and stop and see how high the corn had grown that day. New England, not Kansas, the growing was slow. You couldn’t stand there and watch the tassel emerge from the leaves and reach for the sky. But we always paused long enough, just in case that was the day and the minute it would happen. One time the imam was there, and he leaned the corn stalk towards us so we could peer into the top. “Not yet.”

“Corn grows here?”

“Corn grows where I grew up. I didn’t know if it grew here. But, yes. It does.”

See that dark green triangle at the top of Egypt? Followed by a tail down the Nile? Corn crops.

When the imam walks into his very typical New England row home, in his fairly typical NorthEastern US city, he wants to see a little bit of his hometown blowing in the bre…