The Very Best of Kate Elliott Read Free

mostly farmland, had four domiciles: The home—formerly a barn—in which I, my parents, and three siblings lived, always with a dog and usually one or more barn cats. A small apartment attached our house which had once been the milk shed, which was lived in by different people over the years. My father’s parents’ home (always called “the other house”) next door. For a stretch of many years a temporary trailer sat between our house and the other house in which lived a nurse about the same age as my grandparents. When I knew her she was a widow with a grown-up child. This older single woman who had a job, practical wisdom, and a wicked sense of humor was a fixture in my landscape, yet such women weren’t mentioned in the histories or fantasies I read. But there she was. She existed. She was real.
    She happened to be friends with my doctor’s nurse, a woman I never knew well but whom I always liked in that distant way a child may like a grown-up whose life seems so removed from her own. Only as an adult did I learn that the nurse I saw for my regular checkups had been a nurse in the European theater during World War II. I never knew this woman had participated in the war in a profound way even though I was always acquainted with the stories of the many male veterans of my parents’ generation. The participation and experience of women in war, in whatever capacity, was not just ignored but set away, papered over; it was another channel lost to view.
    My childhood landscapes stretched into the past and also across the ocean. My father grew up in an enclave of Danish-Americans. As a child he went to “Dane School” where he learned the language of his immigrant grandparents. It happened that he was raised as much by his grandmother as by his own parents; his connection to the nineteenth-century struggles they came out of was part of his childhood and so it connected to me. I assumed everyone was surrounded by a net of older relatives whose memories reached into a past they could briefly illuminate. My great-uncle remembered the first time he saw a car. I heard first-hand stories of how people made their way who had very little money and no expectation of more. Their memories made the world they had been part of not so distant from my own because it was part of the story of how mine had come to be. The Depression and World War II were my touchstones as a child not because I was alive then but because these events were central to the lives of my elders.
    One consequence of my father’s ethnic upbringing was that, after the war, he went to Denmark to study for a year and returned home with a Danish bride. She was a young woman bold enough to leave her family behind and embark for a new country where she did not (yet) speak the language. In our household, a second language was spoken. We ate different foods and had customs that mainstream American culture viewed as peculiar or charming. This upbringing contributed to creating a view of myself as fractured. I belonged to the mainstream culture because I was white and had an enthusiastically approved European ancestry (Scandinavian-Americans being among that small group of foreign immigrants to the USA who never had to “become white” but were always accepted as white), but I sensed that other topographies influenced my personal landscape as well.
    After I wrote that initial story with its two generic male protagonists having adventures in a world filled with men, I made a conscious decision to write stories with girls or women as the lead characters. I knew I would be told that I was merely writing “wish-fulfillment,” and at that time I believed it was wish-fulfillment to populate my stories with whatever characters I wanted, especially ones who represented people like me.
    That the standard stories I read provided their own form of wish-fulfillment to the men reading and praising them hadn’t yet occurred to me.
    At the same time, elements I took for granted from