My creative juices have been subjugated by grading papers, heat, family stress, heat, financial stress, and more heat this summer. However, I have read some wonderful books with prose as refreshing as the ocean breezes I am yearning for.
So instead of writing for the sake of writing (poorly), I’ve decided to share some of these refreshing breezes with you, all from a lovely little book, My Ántonia by Willa Cather.
“I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping…”
“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.”
“In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of the fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”
“As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.”
madmuser 