Book Recommendation: Gathering from the Grassland

 

This week, something a little different—a book recommendation. I'm inspired by my fellow Geneablogger Marian Woods of Climbing My Family Tree who last week reviewed a book with the genealogical message to curate and donate your family history.

On our recent vacation, I picked up a book called Gathering from the Grassland: A Plains Journal, by Linda M. Hasselstrom (Glendo, Wyoming: High Plains Press, 2017). I was partly drawn to the book because it is set in the very places we'd been visiting. Hasselstrom owns a family ranch in South Dakota. I was also intrigued by the book's journal style, with one entry per day for an entire year, and the promised nature observations of this beautiful area of our country.

I absolutely love this book. It resonated on so many levels—and here's the genealogy-related bit— in part because as a ranch owner with no descendants to whom to pass her family's land legacy, she struggles with what so many of us face: How do we part with, or pass on, what we have accumulated over a lifetime, and what we have inherited?

Throughout the book, Hasselstrom also peeks into the lives of her parents and grandmother—and even her younger self—by reading the diaries, journals, and letters that they left behind. She does so partly to determine if there is any value in them worth donating to some entity, such as an archive, but also to come to grips with each relationship. Each item brings with it long-forgotten memories, informs the past, or sparks new dreams. She writes, "What memories hide in our brains, never released unless we hear the right sound, or smell the precise awakening scent?"¹

As family history researchers, we may grapple with this same task: rereading family letters or cards, and sorting through memorabilia. I've written in the past about how that task can be both emotionally demanding and cathartic. (See "It's a Journey")

Hasselstrom occasionally researches her own family history much as a genealogist would. In one episode, she tries to learn more about her biological father (whom she never saw after age four), by researching online to locate a courthouse and obtain her parents' divorce record.²

I was deeply struck by Hasselstrom's notice of "journals" of other types, how we each leave our mark on various aspects of our world, which can be "read" as chapters in our lives. In one passage, she writes, "Grandmother's journals were in her letters, her crocheting, her rag rugs, her recipes. Though she didn't write about her life, I find clues to her household's poverty and interests by reading what she has written or pasted into the blank pages."³

In another, when gifting several horse saddles to a nearby ranching family, she writes, "After they left, I cried from the memories of riding with my father..., but I smiled too, knowing those saddles will be ridden and cared for by other families for generations. Scars in the leather, the journal of the work my family and I did in those saddles, will be overlaid with scars of a new generation."⁴

Hasselstrom is a poet, author, and mentor (she runs a writing retreat at the ranch as well). Her writing is beautiful and evocative, painful, and truthful. She weaves nature, day-to-day life, and grappling with both her family's past and the future of her ranch in a beautifully written book, taking readers along on a year-long journey towards reconciliation. Those with a love of family history might find much to ponder and appreciate in this lovely book.

Until next time...

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© Nancy Gilbride Casey, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

IMAGE: Nancy Gilbride Casey, Grasslands near Badlands National Park, South Dakota, 3 July 2024.

NOTES

¹ Linda M. Hasselstrom, Gathering from the Grassland: A Plains Journal, (Glendo, Wyoming: High Plains Press, 2017), 144.

² Ibid, 168.

³ Ibid, 141.

⁴ Ibid, 244.