March 7th memories

I had to get to know my neighbors before I came to understand that Luxembourg, the nation, and the neighbors' country of origin, is just about the size of Plymouth County, Iowa, a place a goodly number of Luxembourgers came to live when they came to this new land.

It was 1870 when they got here on a long, ox-drawn trek from other side of the state and a tiny town named for their own patron saint, St. Donatus, which, by the way, is  the name first given to the village of Alton, just down the road. 

The rural lands all around must have looked emptied and intimidating, even though nothing caught the eye but everlasting swaths of wide-open land and sky. One of the early immigrants to Orange City said when he looked over the land that would become a town, he could see only one tree. One tree in infinite open space. Only in northwest Iowa would the newest state residents put up sod houses. Sod was all they had.

There weren't a ton of neighbors either. What's more, prairie fires and a sky full of grasshoppers didn't make the world, out here, particularly accommodating. One of the very first families to inhabit the space that would become Sioux Center, Jacob Koster, who homesteaded the town's downtown park and planted mammoth cottonwoods didn't stay around long, but high-tailed it back east where life wasn't quite so blasted tough. 

The world created by Ole Rolvaag in Giants in the Earth ain't much of a joy really, no more fun than that created by Hamlin Garland in Main-Traveled Roads or Josephine Donovan's Black Soil.

Maybe tough worlds make for sweet myths. If you work your hands to the bon for your first fifty years, you may just make up sweetness if there's not any to be found.

How about this? Koster's wife's stove went kaput. Off they went, in the wagon, to LeMars. Five miles south, the horse needed water so they pulled up at a soddie, where a woman came out, busy with something or other. 

Now this is something.

This woman looks up at Jacob Koster, who is sitting beside his wife on the seat on the wagon, sitting there unmoving. Both of them stare, transfixed, before the woman, still holding the blanket-door to the dugout where her family lives.

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