Portable Prairie
Confessions of an Unsettled Midwesterner
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In a moving and bittersweet story, M.J. Andersen chronicles her childhood and adolescence in South Dakota, her departure to forge her own life, and her persistent longing for the landscape she left behind. Her hometown, given the fictional name of Plainville, is so quiet that one local family regularly parks by the tracks to watch the train pass through. Yet small-town life and, especially, the prairie prove to be fertile ground for Andersen's imagination. Exploring subjects as seemingly unrelated as Roy Rogers and Tolstoy's beloved Anna Karenina, she repeatedly locates a transcendent connection with South Dakota's broad horizon.
Andersen introduces us to her hardworking newspaper family, which produces one of Plainville's two competing weeklies; to Job's Daughters, a Christian association intended to prepare young women for adversity (Plainville's chapter assumes the added responsibility of throwing the town's best teen dances); and even to a local variety of hardy alfalfa, to which her best friend has a surprising kinship.
Leaving behind her physical home, Andersen travels East for college, remaining to begin a journalism career. With her husband she eventually settles into her first house, a beautiful Victorian that, though loved, somehow does not feel like home in the way she had anticipated. Through subsequent travels, memories, and a meditation on Tolstoy's complex relationship to his ancestral home, she arrives at a new idea of what home is -- one that should resonate with every American who has ever had to pull up stakes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Before even mentioning her Midwestern roots in the first chapter of this memoir, Andersen compares the events in Anna Karenina to a train-related suicide in her current Massachusetts hometown, musing on Tolstoy's love/hate relationship with his family estate, and his religious conversion, flight from home and subsequent death at a train station. These themes home, trains, exile, Christianity run throughout Andersen's book, and the author, a journalist from a family of newspaper people, skillfully unites them with a voice both vulnerably personal and insightfully far-ranging. In vivid recollections of childhood (which could stand on their own), she recalls the security and smugness of living in a tiny farm town "too far away" for anything to happen; her parents' struggles running a smalltown newspaper; the wonder of rising in the cold of night to catch the train to Minneapolis for Christmas shopping; the Midwestern determination of a local horticulturist to travel the world to find plants that could survive South Dakota's extreme climate; and Andersen's odyssey through crowded, cropless Northeastern regions. Although occasionally indulging in heartland-centric generalizations ("the Midwest has long been the imaginary home of all Americans"), this is an enlightening, moving rhapsody on the spirit of place and the meaning of home.
