A Bit of Beauty: Installment #2

As personal as academic writing should be!

"In Earth Muse: Feminism, Nature, and Art, Carol Bigwood defines home as 'a nomadic place, an unfinished place of variable historical and geographical boundaries, but a belonging-place nonetheless.' I can list the conscious reasons why Nebraska is now my belonging place. When I was four and five, my father worked at the CB&Q railroad shops in Havelock, Nebraska. Consequently, I began the first of twenty-some years of schooling at Hartley Elementary in Lincoln, Nebraska. Fresh out of college I was hired to teach English at Westside High School in Omaha. After three years of teaching, I returned to southeastern Iowa, where my son, Ian, was born (though he was conceived in Nebraska) and I attended graduate school in Western Illinois. Four years later, Ian and I moved to Lincoln. During the seven-year period that followed, I published my writing, married, bore a daughter, Meredith, earned a Ph.D., and divorced. And during that time, I became aware of the natural world in a way that I had not been before. Thus, the first and only landscape I've known both objectively and intimately is Nebraska's grasslands.

"Perhaps like monarch butterflies who migrate north from Mexican forests in relays each spring and summer, the females laying their eggs along the way, new generations replacing the old, I too was driven to this place by a memory older than me. When I returned to Lincoln for graduate school, I rented an apartment and later a house in the Russian Bottoms north of the train yards, a neighborhood settled by Germans from Russia in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Each evening I walked this neighborhood, learning its history from the buildings, the residents, and later, from books. Upon hearing my last name, some of the elderly residents asked if they could heft my long, hay-colored braid to see if it was as heavy as a mother's, grandmother's, sister's, wife's. An old man who lived across the alley often tried to converse with me in a language that resembled German. Several years later my brother showed me what he had collected about Knopp family history. He discovered that our paternal great-grandparents' first attempt at homemaking following their arrival in America in the 1890s was not in Burlington, Iowa, but in Hastings, Nebraska.

"These Knopps (pronounced Kuh-nop) already knew something of exile. When the German government demanded military service of their men in the eighteenth century, they moved to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, a German. For over a century, my father's father's people lived in insular German communities and farmed the Ukrainian steppes during their sojourn until again military service was demanded of them, this time by the czar. My father's family did not leave soon enough. Knopp males were conscripted into the Russian army or the Russian navy. In Nebraska, my grandfather's people were neither Germans nor Russians, but Germans from Russia or 'Roosians.' A few years after their arrival in Hastings, Nebraska, years made difficult by a long, severe drought, my Knopp ancestors settled in Iowa, where rain was more plentiful and the Mississippi ran its banks most springs. There they were simply Germans.

"Perhaps other reasons that I neither know nor can name bind me to this place, not a place in which I sojourn, but a place to which I belong and that belongs to me."

- The Nature of Home, Lisa Knopp (pgs. 4-5)

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