The subtitle of Judy Dykstra-Brown’s ‘Prairie Moths’, is ‘Memories of a Farmer’s Daughter’. In truth it is much more than this. Through this free verse tale of an adult, well-travelled woman revisiting the South Dakota of her childhood she links us with her early years, her family of origin, and her ancestral forbears in an eloquently visceral manner. We learn how she developed from a young child in the long, lonely expanse of land devoted to farming crops at the expense of trees and the natural growth, through the yearning of adolescence, to the seeker after deeper experience.
Her love and respect for her parents, to whom she dedicates the work thus: …” to my dad, who taught us the worth of a good story as well as the importance of embellishment with each retelling; to my mother, who was smart enough to raise us on the prairie and wise enough to encourage us to leave it; and to my sisters, Betty and Patti, who lived their own versions of many of these tales and would undoubtedly tell these same stories with a different twist.”
Judy’s descriptions are poetic and engaging with no superfluities. “Here I would sunburn/ and sand-stick/ and deerfly-scratch”. Her plentiful alliteration is mostly subtle and never clunky: “and killdeer flight/ in the flickering shade” “only the wood ticks/ awaited me in the thickets…” “in the cocklebur and the chigger-infested grass,/ in the crooks of cottonwoods and caves of thickets.” “The Sioux had long been sequestered”.
She doesn’t tell us cattle were branded, rather that they “wore the tattoos of their owners.” Speaking of “their leaves frosted by moonlight and the Milky Way, suggests she may have learned something from Anton Chekhov’s “Don’t tell me the moon is shining: show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
All senses are embraced: “the long and lonely whine of diesels on the road” “mourning doves still crooning” “a mysterious, sweet and fecund smell -/ a mouse smell new to me.” “I watched instead a meadowlark/ soar over brown fields…” “I ran in the wet dew of the condensing summer heat.” “the warm water flowed so sensuously over my shoulders” “Like myself sheltered/ in the arms of the child I’ve grown from,/ That child who,/ wanting to grow up and feel less,/ comforts her grownup self,/ who wants/ the feeling/ back” The way Judy constructs the lines in the whole piece is exemplified by this extract.
“Kicking the hard clogs with my feet,/ I knew that under me/ were arrowheads,/ flint strikers ……. to be turned up/ some day/ by the plow of my Dad”. Thus our author links her father and their predecessors.
A woman passing her “with a cart full of Sweet Williams”, unfurls a series of memories of the farmer’s daughter and the elements of her parents which she values and respects.
First published in 2010, I do hope it will still be available to my readers to whom I thoroughly recommend these memoirs.
Throughout the day, while unrelenting water music played on my window panes, I was able to enjoy preparing this post.
This evening we dined on salt and pepper and tempura prawn preparations, vegetable wantons, fried leak and onions, cauliflower, all on a bed of Jackie’s colourful savoury rice, with which she drink Diet Pepsi and I drank Christian Patat Appassimento Puglia Rosso brought by Ian at Christmas.
