Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Spring 1998

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 113-26.

Comments

Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

I spent the first sixteen years of my life on Iowa farms. We lived in rural Adair County, Iowa, in an area that was remote, quietly tucked about halfway between Des Moines and Omaha. All I knew was rural life. My parents were farmers, my grandparents were farmers, and most of my uncles and aunts were farmers. The farm determined many elements of my life. We raised much of our own food, butchered our own beef and pork, raised chickens for eggs and meat, milked cows and sold the cream, wore clothes that defined our tasks such as overalls and chore boots-and socialized primarily with relatives and other farm families in the immediate area.

I disliked that childhood. I found it confining and painful, contrary to the stereotype of farm life being the ideal childhood. I couldn't play with friends after school because I always had to go home to gather eggs, wash eggs, pack eggs, wash electric milkers, bring in the cows to be milked, and then help my mother in the house with domestic chores. The work was painful and hard, and I found at an early age that I was expected to work as much like an adult as possible. Carrying heavy buckets of sour milk to feed to hogs in the midst of July was hot, full of flies, and painful to my arms and shoulders. Lifting bales of hay and scooping corn made me ache all over. But this was farm life.

As soon as I could find a way to escape, I did. That means of escape was through books. I read as much as I could, starting in third or fourth grade with biographies, generally of famous women. I would read about Abigail Adams and Florence Nightingale and Amelia Earhart, letting the excitement of their lives fill me. As I approached junior high, I switched to romances-shallow, silly books that focused on being attractive for the right boy, the power of the first kiss, and true love. Somewhere around the age of fourteen, I moved to "real" literature. And it was at this point that I turned away from American literature and toward English literature, reading Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and as much Shakespeare as I could make myself understand. Later I ventured to Les Miserables, shifting my reading tastes as far away from my own life as possible.

Many years later, when I began to teach literature to high school students in a small town in west-central Nebraska, I would tell them that literature reflects society. I used that concept to help them connect with the literature, to let them know that the ideas expressed came from real people who had had real experiences, who lived lives in some way like theirs. To some extent, this idea worked for me as teacher. But, at some point, it broke down for me as a reader when I began to explore where literature reflected the segment of society in which I had been raised.

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