Willa Cather at Home

Great American author, Willa Cather

When Willa Cather was 68 years old, she visited her birth- and childhood- homes in Gore, Virginia, which is located about 80 miles west of Washington, DC.  This was her last visit to Virginia, for she died only six years later.  She was gathering information to write her last and most personal novel, “Sapphira and the Slave Girl,” which takes place on “Back Creek,” an actual place near the two homes where Cather spent the first nine years of her life before the family moved to Nebraska.      

“The great disadvantage about writing of the places you love is that you lose your beloved places forever – that is, if you are a quiet person who doesn’t like publicity.” She wrote this in a letter to woman named Miss Masterton, who had written Cather a ‘fan letter’ praising the latest novel about a jealous landowner named Sapphira and a beautiful slave girl named Nancy.  (This quiet and very private person’s letters have been published expressly against her wishes in a book called “The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.”  The editors state that the “statute of limitations” has expired and that she is now part of our cultural history.)  Cather continues in the same letter:   

“I have not been back to Virginia since Sapphira was published . . . Such simple, honest, earnest people live there.  It would have been the same forever if motor cars had never been invented . . . It was the most beautiful piece of country road that I have ever found anywhere in the world.  I never found anything in the Swiss or Italian Alps so beautiful as that road once was.”  

Apparently, Miss Masterton had taken a visit to Virginia to trace the steps outlined in the novel.  “I seem fated to send people on journeys,” she remarks to Miss Masterton, and then proceeds to tell her about other readers who have similarly gone “a-journeying” to such places as Quebec and New Mexico, based on her books.  She tells her that the slave girl, Nancy, is a real person, and that the story is based on an event that actually happened.  “She was exactly like that, and old Till was just like that.  I was between five and six years old . . . “ – but Cather seems apologetic in the letter when she refers to the house called “Willow Shade” where she lived from ages 2 to 9:

Cather's home from ages 2 to 9

“I am sorry you saw that desolate ruin which forty years ago was such a beautiful place, with its six great willow trees, beautiful lawn, and the full running creek with its rustic bridge.  It was turned into a tenement house long since, and five years ago the very sight of it made me shiver.  Of course, it still lives in my mind, just as that March day when Nancy came back still lives in my mind.”

Cather would perhaps be happy to know that Willow Shade, 70 years hence, is privately owned by a non-Cather family who reside there and have restored it to historic standards – (though she was not to know that the house served as a hospital for a short while after it was a tenement house).

The very sight of it made me shiver . . . That is the one phrase in this letter that stays in my mind as I stand before the other home, that is, the birth home of Willa Cather.  I have come here for the last five years or so, on a sort of annual pilgrimage (yes, Miss Cather, you send me a-journeying too!) – and why? – I suppose to observe the slow deterioration of the birth home of this favorite author of mine before it is gone forever – sharing my private condolences with her each time I stand in the front yard where I imagine this great American author might have taken her first steps in life . . .       

Willa Cather's birth home today

The decrepit condition of her birth home would undoubtedly cause Willa Cather to shiver profusely.  She most likely stayed in this home whenever she came to visit Virginia, for it was owned at the time by Cather relatives.  In this home, in the years preceding the writing of Sapphira, I imagine she acquired both the inspiration and material for her final novel.   She made no comment about this house in any of her letters that I have read so far, most probably because it was well tended at the time and she had no concern or need to make comment.       

The home today is taken over by termites and neglect.  Once lived in by Cather relatives, the home has been abandoned for decades and is for sale by the current owner who would love to see it preserved but does not have the resources or ability to do so himself.  Unfortunately, neither the State of Virginia nor the literary scholars of our nation, nor the Willa Cather Foundation of Red Cloud, Nebraska has shown any interest in preserving this historic landmark – though a very nice sign in the front yard proclaims it a noteworthy spot.  And so, I stop by the house each spring to linger and wonder, take a few pictures of the changes I see, and then leave.      

While scholars busy themselves to publish private letters that the author had expressly stated should never be published, the author’s own birth home – located near “the most beautiful piece of country road . . . in the world,” amongst a people she said were the most honest and earnest – is sadly given over to termites and the next big storm that deems to take it down.  We should all shiver to know this.

I imagine Willa Cather taking her first steps here

Did she gaze out this window while imagining Sapphira?

The Interrupting Cow

My eldest adult daughter, when she was a young child, told a particular joke with such proficiency –  never failing to elicit the hoped-for surprise response from aunts, uncles, parents, and others – that it endured for bounteous years.  It was one of the endless variations on the knock-knock series . . . 

MOOOOOO!!!

Knock, knock

Who’s there?

Interrupting cow.

Interrupting cow wh . . .

Pause to explain.  This is where the child’s skill of ‘timing’ comes in, for she must scream MOOOOOOO!!! in an obnoxious manner before the adult has had a chance to finish the final response, “Interrupting cow wh . . .”

  

MOOOOOO!!!!  Much laughter ensues when the adult comes to realize what has just happened.  The adult has been interrupted . .  . MOOOOOOO!!!

This might define many years of motherhood for me . . .

I had a vision . . . I could see and feel and hear the thoughts in my brain, perhaps manifested as brain synapses – tiny strands of matter that connect and make sense of all the data coming and going -- and these connecting synapses were being chopped into bits and pieces by a fine sewing scissors – all day long.  Perhaps the living links carried thoughts or story ideas or plans for a future life, or the line of a poem I’d write one day, or maybe just dialogue with myself – but interrupted, snip-snapped, all day long – until my brain felt inside like a bowl of chopped up, one-half-inch sized spaghetti pieces.  This was my vision.  And each night, as I slept, some of those pieces (I could sense it, I say!) would secretly reconnect – and I would remember . . . but then, a new day began and they would be disconnected, snip-snapped, again. 

I often wondered what I was doing to my brain, what was happening to my brain in those many years.  What would be the long-term accumulation, I asked, of always having the brain synapses snipped just as they were trying to connect?  Would there be a learned response for disconnection? . . . would learning stop?  Would I develop an induced form of Attention Deficit Disorder?  Would my brain eventually stop thinking altogether?  Was I creating Alzheimer’s in myself?  All those uncontrollable interruptions of young motherhood were coming at me from every angle . . . I felt them in the brain, saw the break, experienced it, heard the sharp snip-snap, and I worried about it.  I often said, “I just want to complete one sentence in my brain . . . without interruption.”  I wanted to write books full of sentences someday.  What was to become of me?

Brain synapse, "the connector"

My fear – or hunch – has been corroborated.  In the New York Times last Sunday I read an article called “Brain, Interrupted” which studied, not mothers, but regular people, subjecting them to interruptions (only two! what a joke) while requiring them to perform a simple task of reading something and answering questions about it.  The Interrupted Group scored 20 percent lower than the Control Group.   “In other words, the distraction of an interruption, combined with the brain drain of preparing for that interruption, made our test takers 20 percent dumber,” the article says.

The High Alert Group was warned there might be an interruption, but the interruption never came.  Unbelievably, this group improved by 43 percent over the Control Group.  This surprise finding suggests that participants learned from their experience, and their brains adapted.  “Somehow, it seems, they marshaled extra brain power to steel themselves against interruption, or perhaps the potential for interruptions served as a kind of deadline that helped them focus even better.”

Nowhere in the article does it mention snip-snapped synapses or spaghetti bowl brains – but I had the vision (for I am prone to such things), and I know this is what happens.   

My greatest lesson from all those years is this:  Anticipate interruptions.  Life will never be free of it; interruptions do not go away, they only change.  When I sit down to write or even read, I am prepared.  My brain is on high alert.  I was trained by the best.  And now I know, because of the aforementioned article, that if the day should ever come when there is not a knock-knock or a ding-ding, for even an hour, I will accomplish much.