Postcards from Cather Country

I’m still floaty and a little breathless from a trip I took last week to my home state of Nebraska. I traveled with a friend I’ve known since second grade from Lincoln to Red Cloud, the childhood home of Willa Cather, who was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved to Nebraska at age 9. The landscape and people of the waning years of the homestead era imprinted on her strongly, inspiring indelible portrayals of settlers from the Eastern United States and Europe, in particular in her novels My Ántonia and O Pioneers! I’m sure I’m not alone in that when I think of my own unbreakable, kindhearted grandmothers, I think of Ántonia Shimerda, who preceded them by just one generation.

My friend Laurie, a Cather scholar, had curated a two-day Willa Cather immersion tour for us. While my big-city (Omaha) bias had me wondering how we would possibly fill two whole days in a town with a population of 962, I was only 8 or 9 myself when I learned not to argue with Laurie. If Laurie said two days, it’s two days.

And what a couple of days. We saw not only the gently restored childhood home in Red Cloud, but an assortment of town and country churches (with and without floors), five or possibly six rural cemeteries (I don’t want to exaggerate but I do think it was six), plus the homes of some of the people on whom Cather directly based her stories, most movingly the farmstead where Àntonia Shimerda (Anna Sadilek Pavelka in real life) founded her family, after all she went through to get there. The Pavelka fruit cellar moved me to tears, thinking of the little Cuzak children bouncing out of it into the light. We also saw old and new Nebraska educational TV documentaries at the National Willa Cather Center, and for an extra treat spent a happy hour in the archives looking at objects from Cather’s life in Nebraska, Pittsburgh, New York, New Hampshire, and New Brunswick. When I asked, do you have any of her clothes?—the archivist opened a drawer containing a beautiful embroidered green wool jacket seen in portraits of Cather. There is nothing like a piece of well-loved clothing to bring a person back to life.

A big highlight was staying in the Cather Second Home, the house where Cather’s family moved after she left home. I slept in the room she stayed in when she visited her folks, awaking each morning to the sun streaming in off the second-floor porch where she liked to sit and read. I ambled to the kitchen to make myself a coffee, wondering what she would make of their house being an Airbnb and having a wifi password.

Perhaps the biggest highlight: walking on the never-been-plowed Cather Prairie at sunset, trying to imagine how the Cathers felt when they first arrived by train from the East. Oh yeah, the train station is preserved. The sandstone bank building from A Lost Lady is there, magnificently restored. The opera house is there, still in use. The Cather historians are not messing around.

I came home with a bag full of books and a heart full of tenderness. Getting to have this experience with the North Omaha bestie with whom I read and re-read and re-re-read Wilder’s Little House series so many years ago was a pure prairie gift.

There Was Knitting

I don’t travel without knitting, and I know enough to bring a super easy project in case I can’t concentrate on something more ambitious. But this time the super easy project, a mistake rib scarf, was too easy; it bored me even when we were sitting in the dark watching educational TV.  So I kept trying to knit on the yoke of my passion project, The Twigs.

The Twigs has two kinds of stranded motifs in it: the ones you can knit in the car and the ones you can hardly knit at all.

Just kidding! But that big twiggy section with the crossed fronds?—that’s an 80-stitch repeat, worked five times over 400 stitches. And I was at the start of those 19 rounds when I left New York.

If it’s 80 stitches, I have to question how you can call it a repeat—just saying, Junko Okamoto! Call me old fashioned, but I feel like a repeat should…repeat.

I’m just having a laugh—this sweater has my heart precisely because of that 80-stitch pattern; it’s sublime.

In conclusion: I didn’t get that far on The Twigs while Laurie and I rambled around Red Cloud. On the delayed flight home, I got into the groove enough to get through all 19 rounds of twigginess, and now I’m back on the twig-free blacktop of those lovely 4- and 8-stitch repeats. Two rounds from separating sleeves and body! More in love with The Twigs than ever! Go me!

Yarn and other details about The Kay’s The Twigs can be found here.

More about Willa Cather

On YouTube:  Willa Cather Center Intro Film, narrated by Ken Burns, and Yours, Willa Cather.

The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, digital archive.