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. 

Transformations

Sarah: born 1830, died 1855

I sit outside on a lovely stone patio in the Shenandoah Valley sipping a glass of nearly-black ruby wine near the gravestone of a young woman named Sarah Girtrude Lynn, the long ago owner of this expansive property who was buried here in 1855.  I sit amid one of the most beautiful vineyards in Virginia on the most idyllic of days in April, just myself and lovely Sarah – or so I feel – sipping the special Locksley Reserve Norton wine, made from the native Norton grape which this vineyard, Chrysalis, has made its mission to reclaim and rehabilitate as Virginia’s own state wine.  Of 70 acres of vines at Chrysalis, 40 are dedicated to the Norton grape.

The Norton grape has a long history, at least long in the sense of winemaking in America.  Of the 25 or so grape varieties native to North America, only the Norton has been able to produce a good dry table wine (there are plenty of sweet table wines in America).  And the original Norton vine was actually propagated by a Dr. Daniel Norton in Richmond, VA around 1830 (he'd been working on it for at least 10 years) from the seed of a grape that is genetically related.  Norton thrives in America when given a chance, in all soils and climes, and has been disease resistant ever since.

The native Norton grape

However, for whatever reasons or mishaps or misunderstandings, the grape was doubted, unappreciated, and outwardly rejected for many years – in spite of having been deemed “The Best Wine of All Nations” at the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873.  The rejection of this grape and the preference for European varietals is detailed in the book, The Wild Vine, subtitled "A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine."  Having read the book and sipped the wine and been made a convert, I am on pilgrimage to see the wild vine with so much history and to sit in the place where its resurrection is all around me.

Winemakers, I’ve discovered in my forays to only some of the 220 wineries in Virginia, either discount the Norton grape, or are passionate about it.  It is like a gem to some, buried and lost and found again. The Norton grape is called earthy, musty, deep, and confusing.  It is the kind of grape that is deceiving in its forwardness early on – and easy to reject because it is so loud and hard to understand – but, given time, it becomes rich and profound and moderated and textured.  It is like the prodigal son who goes wayward only to return decades later a changed man.  It is a confusing wine, but given time (6 to 8 years in the bottle, even more, they say), it is transformed.   

Grapevines in early spring

I cannot help but contemplate the short life of Sarah as I sip my wine made on this land once belonging to her.  Born in the same year that Dr. Norton’s grape was named after him, she was orphaned at age 15.  She was to inherit the beauty and richness of this spot in the Shenandoah Valley, but not the wealth of longevity to enjoy it.  She died at age 25 from consumption.  The land was divided among distant relatives in the decade prior to the Civil War, and eventually lost to all family members in subsequent years.  Sarah could not have known that her simple grave marker would be found while the land was being cleared and excavated to make the patio for a vineyard in the distant year of 2000 – (I learned all of this about Sarah while my host in the tasting room poured sample after sample of very good wines) – she could not have known that there’d be a shrine set up for her in the most trafficked spot on one of the most trafficked vineyard in the state – could not have known on her deathbed at age 25 that people 150 years hence would toast her young, unfinished spirit.    

 Toast . . . 

I simply sit here – and that is what wine is for, I think – to be in the present state – all pieces in one place – Sarah’s land, Dr. Norton’s grape, a winemaker’s vision, the shadows of the toasts of many that have come before – transformation complete.

Heirloomed

There is a big, flat box which I brought back from beneath my mother’s bed when she died four years ago; and since that time, the box has been under my bed, in my attic, on the top shelf in my closet, on the floor in my closet, in plain view, on various chairs, on my desk, near my desk, and beneath my desk where my feet could not rest until they acknowledged what was there.  That box contains the disorganized photos of an extended family life that started even a generation or two before I was born.

The Family Memory Box

My intention has always been to scan each and every photo, to create some semblance of order by generation or by topic or by person or by chronology – I didn’t know which – and to organize them into neat digital albums.  I could then duplicate these albums with the touch of a button or two, and distribute them to anyone interested – giving sense and semblance of what had transpired in one zig-zaggy family line from Germany to America.  The originals would also be put into albums to be handed down to . . . the most interested descendent.

Four years have passed, and I have scanned as many photos (four), though they had nothing in common with each other – I just liked the photos.  They were wily subjects or people that resisted categorization – they were better off standing alone – and so they became just four photos scanned.    

Grandma Golem

There’s a picture of my grandmother at Cherokee, NC standing next to an Indian dressed garishly with cheap feathers, beads and headgear.   It was 1967 and I was a 10-year-old child standing right about where the cameraman is taking the photo.  I remember him telling my grandma to smile.  My grandma was a fiercely independent and strong willed woman who always questioned the roles handed out to women long before it was commonplace to do so.  My mother said she was very intelligent, but had to quit school at age 8 to work in a sewing factory after her father died in a drowning accident, leaving a wife and four young daughters.  She lived alone for many decades after her children were grown and her husband left her, until she broke her hip while taking her daily walk through a Buffalo snowstorm.   She was forced to sell her house and move in with our family just outside of Buffalo until five years later when we moved to North Carolina.  My mother said it was someone else’s turn to take her, and that’s when it was decided Grandma would go to California to live with her daughter (who swiftly put her in a nursing home).  Grandma always said she was being “shipped off to die.”  This day in Cherokee with the Indian Chief was one of the last days I spent with her.  She died a few years later.

It’s a disorganized set of tales in that box – each picture needs a narrator to sit by it as it is delivered up for view, a storyteller of a thousand words to point and give direction and disclose the real story behind the picture. 

I couldn’t do it, couldn’t make a digital, librarian-like order out of the chaos of a multi-generational family life.  Each time I bumped into the box or moved it to a more (or less) prominent spot in the house, I thought of all the years in which my mother planned or intended to do exactly what I have hoped to do these last four years – make order out of it.  “Maybe when you go off to college, I’ll get around to organizing those pictures,” I heard her say.  Or, “When I get caught up with the mending, I’ll get to those pictures.”  It ended up under her bed where she could sleep on it – until it was no longer her problem.

Maybe boxes of family pictures aren’t supposed to be organized.  Most of the events and people in those boxes were never ‘according to plan’ to begin with.  Families can’t be alive in a photo album, digital or tactile, any more than a textbook can tell their stories.  They’re messy and don’t categorize well.  Some events and people just have to stand alone – and oftentimes the background is a bigger picture than the foreground. 

So when my eldest child on Easter afternoon asked to see the box of pictures from Grandma’s house, I presented the box ‘as is’  (from the top shelf in my closet).   She poured them out onto the floor as I had always done when I was that age – began by digging in, randomly selecting one, staring into it, asking questions – or not.  An hour or two later, when the background of a few chosen photos had been brought into focus and a few things had been made clearer, the piles were unceremoniously stuffed back into the box – for another day, another year.      

  

I wonder if my mother ever noticed what I noticed today as I lifted the sturdy box (which originally contained a “Queen Elizabeth bedspread”) to the top shelf of my closet – in fancy script, the words, Loomed to be heirloomed. 

Tolstoy's Desk

The desk upon which Tolstoy wrote "Anna Karenina"

I imagine the day when Tolstoy might have sat down at this writing desk, in this room, taking refuge from the burgeoning family life in Moscow – that is, the many teenage daughters and his capable, practical wife Sonia who aptly managed the minutia of . . . well, everything.  Perhaps an argument had just ensued about which gown a young daughter ought to wear to an upcoming Moscow ball – after all, the family wintered in Moscow so the daughters could attend such balls and receive a good Moscow education and be part of "good society."

Tolstoy would have much preferred to stay year round at his working country estate, Yasnaya Polyana, just a few hours' coach ride south of Moscow, to toil alongside his many serfs on the soil of his Motherland. Tolstoy, born into wealth, had always held onto his ideal to be part of the common people, the "true" Russians, he called them -- their folklore, their wholesome peasant food, their simple pleasures.  Sonia was irritated by this ideal of his – after all, she had a household to run, daughters to marry, work to be edited and published and given credit where credit was due.  They were always at odds with each other in this way, Sonia and Leo – his high ideals and the romance of life among the working class, her practicality in what was needed to run a household.  Always the arguments . . .

The Tolstoy family photos

I imagine it was in this state of mind that Tolstoy retreated one cold Moscow morning to his desk in the small room at the back of the house.  I imagine he sat for a few moments in meditative solitude as the din of family life subsided from his conscious mind -- the echoes, the fury, the inescapable world of practical matters still audible through thick walls meant to barricade him from this world . . . this world . . . of Moscow society and teenage daughters and ever-practical wives . . . oh, this world.

So, I imagine . . . that Tolstoy eventually sat slightly forward at the tidy desk which Sonia had only that morning cleaned and prepared and made ready for writing.  He would have picked up his pen, dipped it in a full ink well, shuffled a bit of paper to his view (for he was very nearsighted and in fact had sawed off the legs of his chair so he could be closer to the desk), and so write these famous words:  All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

That is how he began the saga of Anna Karenina, the great novel about families -- the Oblonskys, the Karenins and the Vronskys -- each unhappy, but . . . in different ways.  Buried within the novel is the story of Levin and Kitty, representing Tolstoy’s own vision of marital happiness – Kitty, a devoted wife in all things agrarian and otherwise; and Levin, a husband who works the fields alongside his happy serfs.  They represent mutual respect and love and equality for all. 



Sonia's desk: for household business and editing

Of course, I don't really know Tolstoy's state of mind when he approached his desk in Moscow to write Anna Karenina.  Honestly, I don't think he was moved by inspiration nearly as much as careful planning.  I do know that he and Sonia fought their entire lives about his ideals and her realism -- she, always determined to keep him on track; and he, always headstrong to go off track -- until eventually he did so in his old age by boarding a train after a heated argument and thus contracting the illness and delirium that ultimately killed him.  Sonia carried on the fight for practicality even after his death -- now with publishers who would deem to use the proceeds from his novels for the "common good" rather than for Tolstoy's own family.  These were pre-revolutionary times, and the publishers believed that the great writer Leonid Tolstoy belonged to the people -- not to his family.

And yet Sonia had managed the household(s), given birth to 13 children, and edited and re-edited and written out by hand every novel her famous husband wrote.  Some even venture to say that it was Sonia's good reason and judgment (and talent for writing) that made its way into the characters we respect so highly in his novels.  She had always been in charge of the details, the minutia, after all.   

I think of all these conflicts and points of view when I look at Tolstoy's desk where he had written, among others, his famous novel about the unhappiest of wives, Anna Karenina – that is, in Russian nomenclature, "Anna, the wife of Karenin."