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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