The Country and The City

'Is it anything more than a well-known habit of using the past, the "good old days," as a stick to beat the present? [I Want to be a Cowgirl] It is clearly something of that, but there are still difficulties. The apparent resting places [open range, children's books], the successive Old Englands [The Wild West] to which we are confidently referred but which then start to move and recede, have some actual significance, when they are looked at in their own terms [Giddy Up, Cowgirl!]. Of course we notice their location in the childhoods of their authors, and this must be relevant [Susan Lowell]. Nostalgia, it can be said, is universal and persistent; only other men's nostalgias offend. A memory of childhood can be said persuasively, to have some permanent significance[Cindy Ellen, Little Red Cowboy Hat]. But again, what seemed a single escalator, a perpetual recession into history, turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated movement: Old England [Old West], settlement [cattle drives], the rural virtues [gender roles]--all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different values are being brought to question [gender, identity, power, imagination].'

-- Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
(1975, 21-2; notes mine)

Notes from a Field II

Notes from a Field

I used to collect horse hair from the barbwire, and dream of running through the tall grass in a lace pink dress--rose pink. As I walked in my t-shirt and shorts, I would pull the grain from the stalks. Sometimes I would cut my finger. Sometimes the crickets were all I could hear. Sometimes I didn't think clouds could ever block the warmth of the sun.