"My Antonia"

I am incredibly happy right now, having just read this novel. I simply cannot express how much it lies in accord with my soul.

When I was eighteen, I was passionately in love with the countryside. Despite feeling myself irresistably called to the pursuit of universals, I came to college resolute that I would dutifully gather up my universals and go right back home with them. Why? Because home was where people knew how to love the land, in the old-fashioned, American way. At home, they knew that the land was there for their use and not their worship (these Californians can't seem to get that straight), but was, nonetheless, also there for their love and admiration. True, my young ideas were, in part, due to a very romanticized attachment to a particular young farmer. However, I often wonder whether I was as attached to him as much as I was attached to that which he had come to stand for. Oh, how I loved the ideals of the farm life! "They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They like to prepare rich, hearty food and see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them."

My academic advisor learned of my attachment at home in my freshman year, and he assured me that the rigour of this program would soon make me unsuited to a life on the farm. I didn't believe him at first. They say hindsight is 20/20, and I cannot say that I at all regret the intellectual development in my life; so many of my gifts would never have been used or developed. The intellectual, contemplative, suburban, easily-sunburned man I have been given is so well-suited to my mind and soul I just know God fashioned him especially for me.
However, I cannot help but remember that all my favourite childhood friends were country folk. I loved chasing chickens and climbing haystacks - even in the rain. The smells of the farm never disgusted me; those were wholesome, hearty smells, and I relished them. My best friend lived in the country, and she always said I behaved like I'd been pent up too long when I came to her wide open place to stay the night - I can remember how she'd shake her head at me as I bolted through their field. I hope that, somehow, God grants me the opportunity to live and raise my children in the country.

More importantly than all else, reading this novel did show me the kind of woman I always wanted to be. Remarkably enough, this ideal has not changed for me in the least since I was eighteen years old.

I want to be Antonia.

"She . . still had that something which . . . could stop one's breath for a moment by a look or a gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things."