With a professional resume that includes critically acclaimed vocal performances on a world stage, the last place you’d expect to find Virginia Croskery is on the business end of a pitchfork in the stables tucked quietly away near Water Works Park.

Do a Google search on this effervescent soprano who has dazzled audiences from Japan to Italy to France to Israel and made a solo recording, “Beloved Songs and Miniatures of Victor Herbert,” with the Slovak Radio Symphony, and you’ll get the idea that she not only has options, but options many musicians only dream about. “I wasn’t a big star,” Croskery said modestly, “but I did sing in some important venues with some important conductors.”

She gave up a promising stage career in 1998 to move to Iowa and become a wife and, later, substitute mother for her husband’s niece, whose parents had been killed in an accident. The marriage didn’t last, but her relationship with Iowa had taken root.

At first, she had some reservations about living in Iowa. Eight years ago, Greater Des Moines had a world-class opera and art center but few of the other amenities – a plethora of ethnic restaurants, art galleries and other cultural attractions – she had grown accustomed to while living in New York, Chicago and other big cities. Greater Des Moines’ cultural scene has changed dramatically over the past several years and Croskery, an assistant professor in Simpson College’s highly regarded music department, vows that she is here to stay.

An Iowan by choice, she got the chance to do something she’d dreamed of doing as a child, but never could as the daughter of a minister whose family moved every few years. When her marriage ended, she inherited a horse, Porte Bonheur, and learned to ride, becoming “enamored with all things equestrian,” she said. Earlier this year, she bought Irish Run Stables, which provides a permanent home for Porter, as her horse is known, and hired trainers to help others discover the joy of riding on the four lesson horses that permanently reside there.

Horsemanship clearly is another of Croskery’s natural talents. As Porter, a three-quarter Belgium warmblood and one-quarter Thoroughbred, effortlessly clears a four-foot-high bar, it’s hard to believe the rider hadn’t mounted a steed until a few years ago. Now, she competes in A-level horse shows and consistently places among the winners.

The stable “needed some love” and Croskery spent the summer tending to it, rather than engaging in “things purely musical,” as she usually does. She approaches stable ownership with the same passion as she does teaching, which she says is more rewarding than “that five minutes of glory” the stage offers.

“I didn’t have the privilege of living my life,” she said. “As a young singer, it is hard to say no. You have to work to eat. I have had a wonderful life in many ways. I have seen the world and speak five languages, but Iowa is the place, in all of my life, that I call home.”

Teaching, though, is not limited to Simpson or to Iowa. Her classroom is wherever her mission work takes her, be it Himalayan Tibet, Honduras, or Rwanda and Malawi, African nations that are among the world’s poorest, but whose people have left indelible marks on her soul that remind her “we are all connected.”

“The names we remember are the people who gave of themselves,” Croskery said. “We all have an obligation to give in whatever ways we can.”