Sometimes, it’s easy to overlook what newcomers to Iowa and its capital city see right away. Cindy Browne, the new executive director of Iowa Public Radio who’s also new to the state, marveled recently about the near-spiritual feeling she got while driving along one of Iowa’s rural highways and seeing a cool mist rising off a freshly harvested field at dawn. We smiled appreciatively. The picture she describes is one of our favorite Iowa canvases as well. There was something else she’d noticed, too, something that added dimension to the pastoral beauty.

“People show up in this town,” she said to our broadening smile.

That’s right, they do. They show up for the weekly service club meetings and fund-raisers. They show up when neighbors are down on their luck, and when there’s something to celebrate, like art or wine or food or any of the themes public events are built around. They show up when disaster strikes, whether here at home, as they did in 1993 when parts of the city were simultaneously under water and without any from the tap to drink, or far away, as they did when Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of the Gulf Coast.

And they show up for the annual United Way of Central Iowa workplace campaign. Man, do they show up. Greater Des Moines, though far smaller than many United Way cities, historically “shows up” its big-city counterparts with the success of the annual workplace campaign.

That level of involvement by citizens makes us enormously fortunate. What it suggests is there isn’t much we can’t fix if we put our minds to it and commit our resources to it. This year alone, United Way has received a pair of $1 million gifts earmarked for early-childhood education initiatives. Barry and Michelle Griswell and Roger Brooks and Sunnie Richer are luminaries who showed a way for the less financially fortunate among us to show up with our proportionate shares.

“We show up.”

All in all, not a bad motto for the city. Short enough to fit on a bumper sticker, but enigmatic enough to make people ponder what it really means. The answer is as close as the next Rotary Club meeting or charity fund-raiser.