I’m headed for central South Dakota later this month–Oacoma, to be exact, a town of about 450 people that’s nineteen miles from where my great-grandparents homesteaded and twenty-five miles from where my father grew up. We’re having a Rigney family reunion, the first I’ve ever attended. And so, it seemed like the perfect time to reread Kathleen Norris’ Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. One of my proudest brushes with fame is having met Norris a decade before she wrote Dakota at a poetry reading in
Buffalo, South Dakota.
I first read Dakota shortly after it came out in 1993, and then again when I moved to the DC area in 2004, my life in upheaval. I’m looking forward to lingering with it a bit this time with a better understanding of what’s involved in a deepening of faith. And, I’ll be thinking about the parallels between what Norris found in leaving New York for her grandmother’s home in Lemmon, South Dakota, and what my mother found in leaving DC after some glorious times in the mid 1940s for the starkness of central South Dakota, where her parents had moved from wooded Wisconsin.
What’s on your nightstand?
