Since growing up on a farm, I have lived in cities, suburbs, and large towns. Still I can’t drive by fields without noting the breed of cows, the height of the corn, or the lay of the land. Nothing produces a greater feeling of contentment than the setting sun easing down behind a rolling meadow with a shallow creek running through it.
That love of the land helped propel me to write The Feedsack Dress and to drive west on portions of such famous routes as the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express, and the Lewis & Clark Expedition. The trip took me through nine states, and the land and the farms differed in each one.
The odd contours of Nebraska—crops almost in terraces, fields flat as far as the eye could see, pastures full of small cone-shaped hills, bluffs rising abruptly—intrigued me. A ranger, native to the state, couldn’t answer when I asked whether farmers or nature created the irregular terraces. He’d never noticed them. We take the familiar for granted.
Virginia-born and Nebraska-raised Willa Cather noticed. She went away to college and stayed away to become a magazine writer and editor and then a novelist. Few people have written about the land and individuals’ connection to it so passionately. I visited her childhood home in the little town of Red Cloud. The sleepy town and the pleasant but unassuming house impressed me much less than the blue, blue sky filled with scores of puffy white clouds. I could relate to her feeling for the place.
I read Cather’s novels as a high school and college student mostly because of her passion for the land and her understanding of the people who cherished their particular part of it. She wrote about one small section of Nebraska, and about what most people who till the fields anywhere feel. I’m looking forward to rereading O Pioneers, My Antonia, and The Song of the Lark. She wrote them almost a century ago, but she portrayed a timeless love of the land.
—Carolyn Mulford
