This is Reframing Rural [Kathleen Hurst: In order to be a successful farmer and rancher one has to have a strong family to back them up] the original podcast series that elevates unexplored stories from rural America [David Anderson: There were always the Roosevelt haters, but in lots of rural America Roosevelt was revered]. But for now I hope you enjoy my narrated essay, Patchwork Quilt. On the back of my couch rests a patchwork quilt made from the old jeans and corduroy work clothes of farm women and men, many long since gone.
It was auctioned off at a bazaar in the church basement one dark October evening where my Mom placed the winning bid, and I immediately coopted the quilt for blanket forts and comfort on days I was home sick from school. The day I moved miles across the Big Sky State to attend the University of Montana in Missoula, the perfectly weighted seven by five and a half foot multi-colored quilt was lovingly packed into the back of my 4Runner.
It kept me warm in the depths of Rocky Mountain winters, comforted me on Sundays I felt homesick and later blocked out white noise so I could record this podcast. My home is filled with reminders like this. Reminders of where I come from. Atop a slab of granite rock pulled from a harvested wheat field rests a spindly skyward reaching houseplant. A found deer skull with antlers sits on a bookshelf filled with classic rock and country records from Mother Maybell to John Prine, Doc Watson and Gillian Welch.
In fact after I left the sandy hills, prairie buttes and coulees of Northeast Montana and Western North Dakota, I sought to distance myself from my prairie past. Arriving to a forward thinking college town from a place that no one had ever heard of, with a slow and thick high plains accent, I was pegged as provincial.
While I tried to laugh off being called a country bumpkin by new friends from sexier places like Seattle, those slurs cut deep. It took me years to admit that, but at the time, I learned to pause and think before I spoke, shedding elongated pronunciations of bag [bayg] for bag, sorry [sorey] for sorry, Megan [Maygan] for Megan.
