Dedicated to God by Reese Abbie

Author:Reese, Abbie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

4

Little House, Big Heart

It’s a whole different world that we’re living in.

Mother Miryam of Jesus

There is a scene that Sister Mary Gemma conjures easily. She has slipped back to this visual memory many times. When she was nineteen years old, she flew to California to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins; it was her first—and second to last—trip by airplane. She hoped the vacation might save her from what she believed to be her calling to cloistered monastic life. She had pictured a “romantic encounter” during her trip to the West Coast. Raised in the country, she reveled in her relatives’ sophisticated and uninhibited lifestyle; they partied with friends and drank alcohol. The trip ended early, with tears.

It is not this memory that Sister Mary Gemma recalls so vividly, though. Finding language for her experience in California takes time; in her recounting, she stops and starts, she pauses, and then she revises the timeline and events. She has not rehearsed the story with multiple retellings.

The series of images she knows so well, and the feelings resurrected by the visual memory, took place before she visited her relatives in California. The scene is not from her own childhood in northern Illinois, near her monastic home of almost four decades. The memory is her own. The experience is not.

Sister Mary Gemma describes what she sees: An open prairie and a family fighting to survive, uncertain if they will outlast the winter. It is the late nineteenth century. Sister Mary Gemma remembers that the family is waiting out a blizzard in the hope the rails will clear so a train can deliver necessities in time. They grind wheat in a coffee mill all day in order to make bread, which suffices until dinner the next night. The family labors for their daily bread; each day, they grind more wheat and then bake more bread to last one more day. At night, the mother sits with her baby on a rocking chair, unable to fall asleep because of the cries of “natives.” Sister Mary Gemma sees the children sweeping the dirt floors of their cabin; because they cannot afford shoes, the children go barefoot from first thaw to first frost.

Sister Mary Gemma loves the dramas of the Ingalls family. She loves reading about Ma and Pa and Laura—the simplicity of their lives, the hard manual labor required to pioneer unsettled territory, the constant threats to their existence, the characters’ faith in powers outside themselves, and their closeness and dependence on one another.

As a child, Sister Mary Gemma’s family drove west through South Dakota, and so she can imagine the lake the Ingalls lived near, the birds that slept on the lake when it froze, the noises they made in morning. “I can picture it,” she says. “I don’t know why. It seems I must have seen it or heard it before, heard these birds. It’s so real to me.” When Sister Mary Gemma first read Little House on the Prairie as a child with an active imagination, the books gave shape to her fantasies.

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