I found my old memory stick today, hidden in my pencil holder! So I poked around, and found this essay bit I wrote a few years ago, on an assignment about women writers who inspired me. I tinkered with it a little, and actually really like it, so I thought I'd post it here...

American Letters

“The world needs a new ecological wisdom…It needs to be faced with its injustices, to hear voices that speak for the voiceless and powerless. It needs conscious women."
~ Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter

The fields here lie in a different time. Snow dusted over the brown remains of an autumn harvest, crisp beneath my boots. I feel the crunch of snow pack through the soles and into my ankles. To my right, against a row of short pine trees, a tractor sits like an extinct species of great beast—the powerful limbs so frozen and dormant, an history iced over. The blueness of this winter sky, the speckled yellow-brown poking through the snow, always the snow, like a museum against the mountains. I never see people in this field—sometimes cattle, black and lazy, sometimes a brown, thick horse, but never farmers, workers, never overalls or red flannel. No movement, just waiting.

Are there still men who rub brow dirt between thick fingers, who smell the wind and whose brows are wrinkled with thoughts of drought? I turn, searching the fields again for a glimpse of Antonia Shimerda, brown face bent towards a plow. I see tracks cut into the earth, and I wonder where these women have gone.

Miles to downtown, where I park parallel in front of the wine bar, as jazz music lining the sidewalks. Dim lights, record players and fancy cocktails in glasses with thin stems shift among the customers inside, slowly, like the steady, underground pulse of fields growing into mountains. I’ve changed out of boots, into kitten heels and a tea-length skirt. I am standing on the edge of an era, here on the sidewalks of Montana, waiting to learn of which memories this country will be made.

This open land, some of the youngest, truly, on this continent. The stories of cowboy and Indians here come from grandfather’s mouth. Prime rib dinners six dollars, rodeos and prospectors. Parents who have lived “boom and bust” cycles of a mining town and strange metal ladders that bend in half and plunge through the ground searching for black gold, light and heat. We are so young, yet it seems ancient—trapped in traditions we haven’t the generations to understand. Frozen in history while future decisions lie around our ankles. Our exploring hearts lift our eyes to the horizon. We still think of the future as something distant, something to be rounded up and tamed. We are still learning this country; we are tripping over ourselves.

Which pieces of the big sky are small enough to be built upon, drilled into, mined or clear cut? What are we willing to demand of this Earth, who has given us so much> Has the West forgotten its past, the godmother and guardian who fed our ever-expanding families and manifest destiny dreams? Here we stand, like eager teenagers in the face of history, prepared to eat her up beneath our shopping malls and casinos.

The field near my apartment is peppered with stakes and orange tapes. A bulldozer waits for the spring to thaw the ground for development. Development—a conservative word for pounding of earth, pouring of concrete foundations, and the transformation of the land into moderns houses. This is the very dirt of our history, a living museums, an open space book with the lessons of women and men to guide us into a conscious future. Our youth and innocence is just behind us, and this legend still flows in our blood.

Pioneer women from all of Europe, from factories in Virginia and cabins in Northern New Hampshire have made this journey before me. I wore a short sundress but felt the rustling of petticoats around my ankles, the depth and strength of blistered female hands on my shoulders, as I hear the whispers of Willa Cather in my ear… “we belong to a world split in two”.

Willa and Antonia were both women of fiction, women of a transitional time. They were transistions, characters in an American drama which I am just learning is far from over. We put our feet in the dirt, all three of us, and tried to understand what she was telling us. The ground beneath us offers her protection to the infants of hope and exploration. She promise us so much.

My pioneer women knew the sacrifice of their Mother. Antonia knew how to coax life from the expansive fields, worshipping with her own blood, her family and smooth skin. Willa could see the meaning in the rhythm of red wheat swaying. Like drinking strong wine, she took life in two hands and moved poetry from the struggle of every existence side by side, man and Earth.

These were powerful days, strong as wagon ruts in the dust, and just as ephemeral. But these women still live in the winds of the West, holding freedom and creation on either hips, birthing a new country with a weathered smile.

I want to protect this, my adopted country, from the demons of itself. We are all pioneers, founders, first families to the land on which we build our homes. The shoulder of Antonia Shimerda, the horse-drawn travels of Willa Cather, have much to teach us, their daughters, of the possibilities in this new country. They embraced the simplicity of life on Earth, of life with the earth. I stand and face winter in Montana, and feel the wisped grey hairs of females past brush my face with America’s potential.