I call this kind of photo a “Willa Cather” photo, because to me, it pays homage to some of the great unsung heroes in American life the women who share the life of the farm.
As most of you know, I am not a farmer, but a writer who lives on a farm. There is a big difference.
There are sheep and donkeys and dogs and chickens and barn cats, we have some of the work of a farm – hay, manure, water, feed and shelter.
I am now 71 years old, and there are things I can do and things I cannot do. I can write and take pictures, I haul hay and water around. I could not live here by myself any longer, a hard pill to swallow, but a reality I accept in good faith.
I see my wife, Maria, as a Willa Cather figure, one of the Plains Goddesses she loved to write about. Cather was a great chronicler of the prairie, the precursor in many ways of the family farm.
On any farm, no matter what kind, there is a woman who shares he sometimes brutish life of the farm – like hauling hay around to feeders in a grinding snowstorm, first shoveling the ice and snow out of them.
There is a Plains Goddess here on this farm.
Even with a vigilant border collie, she is often plowed into by hungry animals, or knocked to the ground, or covered in ice or snow or soaked by heavy rain. She climbs ladders, fixes windows, cleans out roosts, hauls firewood, gets splinters, chills to the bone, tends wood stoves, climbs on ladders, replaces bulbs, fixes broken gates, tends to the animals, talks to each one and comforts them.
After that, she vanishes into her studio, where she loves to be alone and work alone, and makes her art, now sold all over the world. She does whatever she needs to do with strength and focus and creativity, even leading the sheep to their hay in a storm.
Wherever she is, she is herself.
She is a contemporary Plains Goddess to me, and I see this photo as being about something more than her, it’s about the mostly unheralded women on the farm, I think of Carol Gulley Of Bejosh Farm, no one in this world works as hard as she does with the possible exception of Carol’s husband Ed, one of my brothers from a different mother.
They are both made of Willa Cather stuff.
This photo is dedicated to the Prairie Goddess, (although most of them don’t wear colorful slouch beanie hats and psychedelic leggings.
Please check out my new photo-for-sale gallery on my website. This photo is for sale for $130, it’s 8.5 x12 inches, printed on rag paper, signed, unframed. For information, you can contact the goddess herself, [email protected].