When I write about Maria, I have sometimes called her my “Willa Cather girl.” People have often asked me why. I thought it was time I explained it.

Willa Cather, the sometimes unhappy but brilliant novelist of American Prairie women, was the author of one of my favorite novels, My Antonia. That was one of the first books I ever gave to Maria, and I was haunted by how much she reminded me of Cather’s prairie women.

Our lives are so very different from these women and their men, not so hard and back-breaking, but there were a number of things about Antonia and  her characters that often makes me think of Maria.

I think of Willa Cather’s women when I see Maria shoveling manure in the morning in sub-zero weather, or climbing up on ladders to replace broken slate, or shoveling snow until she turns blue, or stacking firewood for hours or digging huge holes for the new trees she loves to buy and plant.

More than that, I think of her strength and her never-ending wonder at the world.  Today I went out to bring her water as she dug her flower garden,  she got up when I arrived, looking in wonder behind me. I couldn’t imagine what she was seeing, I had no idea what she was looking at.

Please turn around, she said, and look at the beautiful lilac flowers right behind me.

I would never have seen them, and after a few minutes of appreciating them, I asked if I could finally get a good look at the garden she had just dug, she was covered in dirt.  I think she could have looked at those lilac flowers for  hours.

Maria is one of those people who has always been afraid of the wrong things. She has often been afraid of things that are small and not frightening, things she could always handle but didn’t know it.

The really frightening things do not scare her at all. She just handles them.

Before my Open Heart Surgery, we laughed and talked for days. I won’t say it was easy for her, but she never bent or broke. I never had to worry about her. She lifted me up.

Women’s role in building America is often pushed aside or dismissed.

Civil War historians rarely chronicle the brutal sacrifices women made for the war effort, or the poverty and trauma they faced when their husbands were killed or wounded.  The LBJ biographer Robert Caro wrote brilliantly and compassionately about the back-breaking lives of the women of the Texas hill country, who had to haul heavy wooden drums of water miles and miles from wells to their homes every day.

It was Willa Cather who first wrote so powerfully about the hardships and strength of the prairie women: Death Comes For the Archbishop, O Pioneers, The Song Of The Lark, My Antonia. There were dozens of movies made about their gun-toting, pioneering husbands, but few about them.

What has this to do with Maria? A lot, really. I don’t emotionalize or worship Maria. I love her and that is different. She is not a goddess or a mythic figure to me, she is very real, and like me, has broken parts to fix. Like me, she can be willful, moody, unpredictable, a pain in the ass.

Isn’t love about what we overlook as much as what we embrace?

But her will is very strong, and her strength seems boundless at times. I guess I am really talking about character.

One of her Cather traits is her determination.

Maria and I have  been through some very good times and some very hard times, and I am always awestruck by her steadiness when under real pressure. It took  her decades of real hardship to become an artist.

Some people crumble under drama and pressure, Maria, like the prairie women, sees real trouble (as opposed to chicken shit trouble) as something she simply must get through. I would not be alive today if not for her strength, and there would be no Bedlam Farm.

I remember the morning when she put up a wall full of chicken wire to keep the donkeys from eating the barn, and then knelt down for 30 minutes to talk to her beloved donkeys.

Today she spent at least a dozen hours digging and  planting and turning over soil and carefully inserting seeds and watering and hauling dirt and rocks so we could have a new vegetable garden.

She could not have been happier or more cheerful working hard and all day on her land, touching the soul, talking to the flowers, exalting at the wonder of a garden. “I love to take care of our home,” she said the other day, after stacking firewood for hours.

I don’t know many people like that.

A number of people, mostly  women, have written me asking me what I mean by calling Maria my “Willa Cather girl.” Even though I’ve only mentioned it a few times, it struck some nerves.

Yesterday Cindy Price of Oregon said the idea lifted her soul. Today Hazel wrote to ask me to ask the meaning of the Willa Cather reference.

Of Cather, Hazel wrote, “I do know she was a writer of the prairies and pioneers, rather mannish, and spent much of her life despondent and disillusioned.”

Willa Cather, a lesbian in a different time, was often, but not always,  unhappy. She was also prolific.

But to be a Willa Cather girl does not mean one must be happy or even fulfilled.

It speaks to strength of character, to a willingness to embrace the hard work of a prairie or a farm. And please don’t be fooled by my photos of flowers and dogs. A farm is hard work, no matter what one does there. Maria does this hard work, without complaint, and with enthusiasm and wonder, more and more as I can do less and less.

And then works all day and many nights to make her art.

She faces life squarely, if it is not easy to live on a farm, it is even harder to be an artist in our sometimes cold and soulless world. She is making it work.

Like Antonia, Maria has a passion for every living thing in the world, and her joy and wonder at life is unrelenting. Sometimes I fear I just don’t have enough enthusiasm and wonder inside of me to keep up with her.

Cather’s women stood up to hardship and storms and loss, much as Maria has always stood by me and by the challenges we have faced together. She would never describe herself in this way, but she is a rock in any storm. I hope I am the same for her.

They didn’t run from trouble or whine about it. They stood nose to nose with it.

Hazel send me this famous quote from Jim in My Antonia – I know it very well – and it has always spoken to me of Maria.

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire, whether it is sun  and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

That is Maria speaking of her art.

In O Pioneers, Cather writes of trees, something Maria loves deeply and lovingly. Trees are among her best friends, she talks to them all the time, and they listen and talk back.

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to they to live than other things do,” she wrote,”I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of  anything; I begin just where I left off.”

Cather wrote that the fact that she was a girl never damaged her ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

The fact that she was ignored and belittled as a child did not ever damage Maria’s ambition to be an artist or to find a partner she could talk to, animals to love, and nature all around her.

You have to be tough and determined to get the things you really want, to live a creative love, and I think it is Maria’s strength and ferocious work ethic (tonight, for fun, she went back outside with her faithful companion Fate to dig up the Dahlia garden in the dark) that makes her a Willa Cather girl to me.

I hope that explains why she is my Willa Cather girl.