When Carl, in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, returns to the farm he laments his life of freedom . “… off 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
us. Our landlady and delicatessen man are our mourners. And we leave nothing
behind us but a front coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter or what
ever we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is pay our rent. the exorbitant rent that one has to pay
for a few square feet in the heart of things.” But Carl’s friend Alexandra who
lives on the farm, sees it another way. “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. Our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if
there were not something besides this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much
worthwhile to work. It is what goes on in the world that reconciles me.” She
understands that it takes something beyond herself, two sides to make a coin:
permanence and ephemera, roots and freedom, responsibility and spontaneity,
cornfields and delicatessens, and for me, Two Dot and Seattle.
