 |  Author : Ruth McLaughlin Edition : Second printing Number of Pages : 200 Publisher : Univ of Oklahoma Pr (Trd) List Price: Our Price: $16.40 You Save: $8.55 (35%) Used Price : $14.97 |
Product Description
At the start of this haunting memoir, Ruth McLaughlin returns to the site of her childhood home in rural eastern Montana. In place of her family s house, she finds only rubble and a blackened chimney. A fire has taken the old farmstead and with it ninety-seven years of hard-luck memories. Amidst the ruins, a lone tree survives, reminding her of her family s stubborn will to survive despite hardships that included droughts, hunger, and mental illness.Bound Like Grass is McLaughlin s account of her own and her family s struggle to survive on their isolated wheat and cattle farm. With acute observation, she explores her roots as a descendant of Swedish American grandparents who settled in Montana at the turn of the twentieth century with high ambitions, and of parents who barely managed to eke out a living on their own neighboring farm.
In unvarnished prose, McLaughlin reveals the costs of homesteading on such unforgiving land, including emotional impoverishment and a necessary thrift bordering on deprivation. Yet in this bleak world, poverty also inspired ingenuity. Ruth learned to self-administer a fashionable razor haircut, ignoring slashes to her hands; her brother taught himself to repair junk cars until at last he built one to carry him far away. Ruth also longs for a richer, brighter life, but when she finally departs, she finds herself an alien in a modern world of relative abundance. While leaving behind a life of hardship and hard luck, she remains bound like the long, intertwining roots of prairie grass to the land and to the memories that tie her to it.
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