Table of Contents
From "Natural Dream Escapes"
By Jenna Stearns '06Written for English 243, Creative Non-Fiction Writing
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
-Willa Cather, My Antonia, 1918I escape often to this path in my mind. The path leads from my childhood home to Regional Access, where my mother works, but I never walk it as if I had any destination in mind, except the path itself. I remember it in postcard shots, sent to myself through time-the gravel road leading up to the neighbors' house, the sprawling cornfield on the left side, and the overgrown meadow on the right. These images are worn soft around the edges, over-handled in my mind like old love letters. I dig them out of the shoebox of memories when I want to get away to another time, another life.
Each step sings me a different memory. These stones remember blood from my skinned knees and the undersides of my feet, happily bare. The stones recall the crunch of my brother and me trudging up the hill, and the whoosh of plastic sleds behind us on the snow. The hill seems too small to be much of an adventure now, but I remember winters when my parents had to beg our blue lips and laughter off it, bribing us with hot cocoa and marshmallows.
At the top of the hill, I walk by the light blue modular home where the Albertsmans used to live. I don't know the people that live there now, at least not beyond their first names. I am nostalgic for days I never knew. I crave the My Antonia-like neighborliness that folks living on the prairie a century earlier might have had.
I can't help but romanticize the simplicity of the life that Willa Cather describes. It's not that life then was less difficult-the extreme hardships of farming communities at the end of the nineteenth century are unquestionable. What I covet are the connections they had with the land and with each other that are so rare these days. Each time I think of Jim and Antonia's lives, I pine for the richness of their community. The Nebraskan countryside was a motley quilt of people who spoke different languages and had all different customs-Bohemians, Russians, Norwegians, and Germans. Their connection with the land and the necessity to live simply threaded them together into a way of life that evolved slowly, at the hand of an attentive seamstress.
Now, the fabric of our society seems to be produced and reproduced much too rapidly by a careless machine. The painstaking stitches needed to hold together vibrant communities and connect them with the land have unraveled. We are left with individual pieces strewn all over the cutting-room floor. These days, good fences make good neighbors and we diligently lock our doors every night. We drive past our neighbors in the confines of our cars, and often don't even know the people who live on our street. We communicate with each other in e-mails and through Instant Messenger, safely isolated from the risks of face-to-face human interaction. What does it mean to love, to fight, to cry, to vent, to philosophize and to dream with each other through this cold medium? What does it mean when hugs, tears, shouting, laughter, and smiles are conveyed with words and cute little yellow faces?
As I continue up the path, I force back these nagging questions. I'm afraid that one day the crisp, earthy smell of the tall grasses and wildflowers under the summer heat will be replaced by the tar-scent of hot pavement. I imagine someday the Weatherbys will sell these fields, and they will be consumed by the suburban sprawl ravaging our country. But I prefer to imagine kids generations ago, satisfying their summer afternoon appetites with the wild strawberries from this same meadow. I hear echoes of children's laughter above the hum of katydids, the quiet rattle of leaves in the wind, and the chatter of birdcalls. The memories of other people's childhoods seem to hide in these undeveloped spaces, intermingled with my own memories.