a bit of a katie girl.

i really like kathleen norris. “dakota: a spiritual geography” is one of those books i wish i had written. that i think i could have written, if i had significantly better writing skills and a bit more introspection. in “dakota” kathleen norris writes of her family’s homestead: “(it is) my spiritual geography, the place where i’ve wrestled my story out of the circumstances of landscape and inheritance”.

my dad and i were talking about kathleen norris when i was home this weekend. we were also talking about our spiritual geography. my spiritual geography. about the fact that (on his side) i am a sixth generation resident of the prairies of southern minnesota. i know that in our increasingly mobile world, this is more and more rare. very few people have that kind of tie to a specific location. we have to create our own geography.

its like those advertisements for the phone company that combine the names of major cities to explain to you the places that call most often. for me its owaolaftwincitiesmetro. next year it will be washiolaftonna. or maybe twinonnawash. depending.

i guess the point of all of this is that the older i get, the more i realize that home isn’t really home anymore. at least not how i originally envisioned it. like so many other things in my life, it is never going to be again what it once was. your geography changes. and even the places you think haven’t changed, actually have. because they now mean something completely different. so while blast softserve is still on the corner of rose and north oak, and still serves my favorite cookie dough ice cream treats, i saw it with new eyes when my brother and i went there last week. same teal shutters and walk up window. different heart.

i was attempting to explain all of this to my best friend a. over dinner in northfield on friday evening and how much it used to bother me. how i used to look at the ice cream shop, owatonna high school and the steele county free fairgrounds and wish i could go back. that i could do it all over again and somehow fix things. prevent a broken heart. walk away sooner. live my life without being afraid of losing him. i used to look at these places, see these places, and only feel hurt and betrayal. the only thing i took away from home was how much i had missed. how much time i had wasted. the same with st. olaf. frankly, i decided to move to washington d.c. because i was terrified of missing my own life. which is what being at home used to make me feel like.

but as i told a., this trip was different. my lame-ass analogy went something like this: do you know how your foot feels when its asleep? numb, but when you try to move forward at all by putting pressure on it, it hurts like hell? that is what my life felt like, my whole body. i felt trapped by this searing pain every time i tried to move forward. because everywhere i looked i saw who i was. and i thought that was who i was supposed to be. but this time visiting home was different.

for the first time it felt like mine again. my own home. not the home of something and someone i’d rather forget. and while i don’t believe in signs, when i was driving up to st. olaf to visit some old friends, i heard the song. you know the one. that song we’ve all claimed as our own that resurrects the skeletons in the closet and makes a scarred wound feel like its bleeding again. mine happened to come on 89.3 the current just as i was pulling onto i-35. and i listened to it. for the first time. in two years. from start to finish. and there were no tears and no hurt. memories, certainly. like the time i recorded myself singing it on his cell phone. but as i remembered that it felt so distant from my life right now. more like a movie that i had watched once than a person i had ever been.

a couple months ago, when i was being super angst-y about staying in d.c. or moving home to minnesota, my brother (wise beyond his years at eighteen) said roughly the following to me: “i know that it took a lot of courage for you to move to washington d.c. and i know why you did it. but you’ve done what you went out there to do. don’t you think the really courageous thing to do now would be to move home and start the new life you’ve created here, where you belong, with your family?”

yes, russ. i suppose you’re right. and as much as moving to washington d.c. has complicated my personal geography, it has somehow managed to simplify it as well. home is home. d.c. is d.c. and i am myself in both places. finally.

xoxo.
ellie

so, i know i promised to put up a new katie girl post every tuesday. and i fully intended to keep that promise. however, things have been a bit crazy around here with strep throat and the cell phone disaster and now i am leaving for a retreat in pennsylvania for the weekend.

so katie girl might have to wait a bit.

although i assure you that the next entry is going to be really good. seriously. and that i will post it next tuesday. until then, here is what’s on my mind (because that’s what a blog is for, right?):

i stayed up until one o’clock finishing o, pioneers by willa cather this morning and almost died it was so good. i like to read cather when i’m homesick. i know she is writing about nebraska, but her descriptions of the plains are painfully beautiful and remind me so much of the farms around owatonna.

i also love that cather was this fantastic, gifted, gender bending lesbian trapped in victorian culture. her writing always manages to convey this in such fascinating ways. in everything i have read about cather’s life there is this great sense of the tension between who a person is, who they are meant to be, and who they have actually become. cather moves to new york city when she’s young and gets this great job as an editor, but what she really wants to do is write. so she creates this mediocre novel that is essentially a second rate version of henry james. other people like it, but cather is unsatisfied…she just can’t seem to find her own voice. frustrated, she leaves new york city and travels to visit her brother and to visit her parents in her hometown on the prairies of nebraska. this is where she finally finds her story. she starts composing o, pioneers and finishes it after returning to the east coast. she subsequently writes several more books and stories about life on the great plains including my antonia and the song of the lark.

i love that cather had to go home before she found her story. she had to reconcile where she came from, her roots, with the version of herself she had spent her twenties creating. and it is in this reconciliation that she must have realized she needed both. home is where she writes about and she writes it beautifully, but she needed both who she was and who she had become to find her authentic voice. roots and wings. somewhere along the line we all figure out we need them both. a lesson i’m still trying to learn.

willa cather was definitely a katie girl. and i envy her (as any author would) for finding the story she was born to tell. you can see her settling into the language of o, pioneers. the prose is absolutely effortless because she is speaking a truth from her own life, complications and all.

i leave you for the weekend with one of my favorite passages, and a promise that i will be back with a new entry for the katie girl project next tuesday. until then:

“she had never known before how much the country meant to her. the chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. she had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”

me too, willa. me too.

xoxo.

ellie