News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The leaves are almost all off the oak trees here, but the temperatures still haven't dropped. So this week we took the rowboat out on a local lake for what may be the last morning this year. The resident bald eagle was out fishing, and the last flocks of migrating water fowl were resting on their journeys south.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about chicken, water, and elections.
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Matt Miller reviews Jon Lauck's recent books on the Midwest and wrestles with the need to recognize the imperfections of our places and their histories: "If we should be attentive to the wrongs represented by such history, we must also be prepared to proclaim even for our ancestors a 'right to imperfection,' as Berdyaev has it. Individual human beings to whom such a right is not extended live under a totalitarianism, whether political or spiritual, which maims their human nature by declining to recognize its essential frailty. So too, we do injustice to our ancestors and the history of our social institutions if we fail to extend to them the right to have been wrong, perhaps even abhorrently wrong."
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Nadya Williams critiques recent coverage of homeschooling by the Washington Post for treating this movement and its members as some strange, exotic tribe: "The overall message is: here, readers, we have discovered a whole new mysterious island filled with these strange savages, previously unexplored. You wouldn’t believe what they’re doing out there! So now we’ll count them for you (can you believe there are so many of them?) and tell you their savage, uncivilized ways. Because we’re scientists."
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Jared Phillips ponders the meaning of the simple dandelion, an invasive species that nonetheless may benefit the land it's colonized: "That little flower, that little yellow bloom that seems so fragile with its fairy promises, takes the sins of my people and tries to make them right. It anchors the world we stand on, nourishes it. It will feed our souls if we can stop killing it. And on a hot afternoon it gives a little girl something to laugh at as she spreads the seeds of promise."
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Rob Roensch reflects on how he might become at home in Oklahoma City, a place he isn't from and one that isn't initially easy for him to love: "What if you can’t live in the place where your imagination feels at home? What if you can’t ever stay in one place long enough to grow roots? What if you have to drive through fast-food-lined headache traffic for an hour a day to get your children to school? Is the solution to find the value in the joke on the Carl’s Jr sign? Is it to be friendly to the stranger in the grocery store? Is it to more intensely contemplate the size of the sky?"
I reread Willa Cather's O Pioneers! recently, and I was struck this time by an exchange between Alexandria, who has stayed on the Nebraska farm, and Carl, who left to make his way in the big city. Both of them feel discontented with their choice:
Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He knew that she understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, “And yet I would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers. We pay a high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard and heavy here. We don’t move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much worth while to work. No, I would rather have Emil like you than like them. I felt that as soon as you came.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro