the Smith farm was on the highway into Williston, the county seat, many of my grandparents’ farming friends and relatives would stop by unannounced for coffee on their way to or from town. In her diaries, Grandma Smith noted who had visited that day and what she had baked—lemon meringue pie, angel food cake, or a kind of date cookie she called “Matrimonial Chews.” Visitors were so common at the farm that one entry comments on not receiving guests: Sat, March 9, 1985: I was home all day. Baked a pie but no company.
My grandmother rarely noted her feelings or reflections about her life, but one of the few reflective passages she wrote makes me laugh: Tues, Jan 25, 1966: I’m cleaning the basement—and it sure looks better. That “sure” sounds just like her, a mix of practicality and positive thinking. If you’re going to do something, it seems to say, do it right—and be happy you’ve done it.
Why weren’t her diaries more personal, more revealing of her thoughts and feelings? I don’t think she worried about someone discovering them. After her death, we found these few diaries stuck in an old cabinet in the basement, more tucked away for safekeeping than hidden. I think instead that she didn’t feel a need to express personal feelings in diary form. What was important was recording the everyday events of her life, keeping track of the weather and the visitors, the comings and goings of a farm on the edge of town.
In a few entries, though, I catch a glimpse of a more private side of my grandmother, moments of the solace she found in the natural world. In her diaries, she would note signs of the seasons changing, especially when a long, cold winter was turning away for spring:
Wed, April 6, 1983: We walked to the creek and found mayflowers and heard a meadowlark sing.
Tues, April 12, 1983: No snow yet. Cleaned house. Saw a meadowlark today. Gophers are running around and also saw a pheasant and two rabbits.
In entries like these, I imagine her looking out the window over the prairie, although “prairie” is my word, not hers. She would say “pasture,” since the long grass is where my grandparents grazed their cattle. I picture her walking to the creek to look for mayflowers, grateful for a sign that spring had finally made its way to the north. She paid attention to the creatures around her because they inhabited the same piece of land. She marked her days by the weather and the seasons because they formed the backdrop of her life on the farm, determining each day’s possibilities. These diary entries reveal an intimacy with nature that seems a private part of my grandmother’s life, quiet moments of grace in the midst of her busy days.
In North Dakota, the monotony of the prairie is broken only where the horizon yields corn or wheat or sunflowers. Trees only grow along rivers and creeks or in long-rowed breaks planted to protect farmhouses from the fierce Canadian wind. Against the prairie’s cornsilk-green and yellow chaff, my grandmother planted flowers in blazing swathes emboldening the landscape from the country roads running east of the farm. My grandmother grew what she called “the front row flowers”—gladiolas, sweet peas, zinnias, and poppies—in front of the steps along the highway-facing side of the farmhouse and in crocks on the outdoor steps. Whenever she watered her flowers, a few drops would leak from the spigot onto the mint that grew in a metal ring underneath. Because water was in such short supply, keeping a little mint alive in the ominous North Dakota heat was my grandmother’s way of beating the prairie.
When I turned fifty, my mother sent me a black and white photo of myself as a baby in my grandmother’s lap on those very steps. In the picture, I’m not looking at the camera; instead, I’m reaching for the pinwheel petunias in the old flower-pot sitting next to me, too tempting not to touch.
Reaching for the flower is one of my grandmother’s legacies to me. Planting the gladiola bulbs as soon as the ground can be worked each spring on my own farm, I think of my grandmother and her persistent attempts to stand out against the prairie. When I dig up the bulbs in fall’s slanting light to store over the winter, I think again of her hard work baking bread, butchering chickens, and putting by all the food her family would need.
But the real hardship for my grandmother, I think, was the isolation of her rural life, especially in the long winters. No wonder she baked every day in the happy chance that someone would visit. No wonder her diary celebrates the first mayflowers and meadowlark call of the spring.
The 2006 Snowstice blanketed the barn and old truck.
On December 26, the light at the end of the day slants warmly across the window seat where I’m mending. After the hectic pace of harvest and holidays, I finally have a quiet moment in the day’s waning sunshine for smaller tasks set aside for the farm season’s end. In winter, I gravitate to this upstairs window like a sunflower tracking the sun. From the south, the light is brighter here than anywhere else in the house as the sun peers straight in through barren treetops.
We have just passed the solstice, the turnaround time of midwinter when the sun is at its greatest angular distance from the earth’s tilt. “Solstice” comes from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). For about three weeks before the winter solstice, which in the Northern Hemisphere is between December 20 and 22, the sun sets at nearly the same time each evening; the same is true for sunrises following the solstice. This stasis feels like the earth is stuck in space because the daylight doesn’t seem to change. While the solstice day itself is the shortest day of the year, at our latitude the earliest sunset occurs two weeks before the solstice and the earliest sunrise two weeks after. On Colorado’s Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, the sunset is always precipitous—one moment bright, the next dim—but somehow today seems already a bit longer than yesterday as the last rays of light drop obliquely behind the snowy peaks and the frigid night begins.
I call the winter solstice the “snowstice” after the December 20 blizzard of 2006 that suddenly dropped two to three feet of snow in Denver, the Eastern Plains, and the Front Range where we live. By most accounts, the snowstice storm was the fourth largest recorded in Colorado history, remarkable even in a state known for its snow. In a blizzard like that, cars hang together like children holding hands in a prairie storm that blows in unexpectedly during the school day, sending families home in a mittened string of oldest to youngest, praying to hit a house or barn rather than wander lost on the prairie. There is no stopping on a darkened snow-driven road, only eyeing the intermittent light of reflectors posted along the shoulder and hoping the tracks in front of you lead to safety.
But after a storm, the sun is brighter than on any other morning as sparkling ice crystals refract the brilliant glare, making winter the perfect time to look at familiar surroundings in a new light. After a snowstorm, I walk the farm, silent on the fresh snow. Tracks left by scurrying rabbits and squirrels cross my path. I spot red-tailed hawks with their snowy plumage and bald eagles perched regally in the bare willows off the creek. Once, I witnessed a coyote stalking a small rodent—a vole or a mouse—on the top of a snowdrift, the predator so intent on its prey that it did not sense my approach. I watched as it tensed, leaped, and captured the animal in its jaws. Only then did it see me; we had surprised each other, thinking we were the only large creatures about on that snowy day.
In winter, we think in black and white, shadows and light, the contrasts stark against a graying sky as fresh snow hoods the upper sides of the tree limbs, white flocking on dark branches. The lengthening shadows of tree limbs across the snow form elegant etchings that capture the frigid outlines of winter’s stately demise. When the sun sits low on the horizon and nothing grows in the frozen soil, the earth itself seems barren. Life is more fragile in this bleak midwinter—tiny creatures scurrying across the bright snow are vulnerable to predators, their dark bodies profiled against the blank winter canvas. Our lives, too, are made of a fragile thing; the line between life and death is sharper in winter, when walking out to get the mail without a jacket risks a numbing chill that hurries us back indoors to the waiting woodstove.
On