For most of us growing up in the Dakotas, we’re only a few generations removed from those who tamed the virgin prairies with plows or fed the nations’ city dwellers with beef, wheat, corn, and pork. Our grandparents, great and great-great grandparents were farmers and ranchers or they were small town merchants who brought plumbing and electricity, banking, and general merchandise to the hardy people who farmed and ranched in the Dakotas. They built schools, churches, stores, and grain elevators. They educated their children who in turn became our grandparents and parents. Instead of speaking German, Norwegian or Czech, we grew up with parents who had heard older people talking in foreign tongues but who themselves spoke fully American English.
Our parents bear the traits of their pioneering ancestors, and we ourselves mirror the hard-working, cautiously optimistic people who tamed the plains. In the Dakotas, life flows with the rhythm of the seasons, and there is solidarity with your neighbors as you endure frigid winters and blinding snowstorms together. Spring is a time to plant, summer to pray for rain for crops and cattle, and fall a time to harvest and prepare for another winter. You help your neighbor because you’re in this together. You stop to help a stranded motorist and you shovel your neighbor’s sidewalk because the next day you may be the one who needs help.
It is from these people our generation descends. We’ve learned to be helpers and doers. We’ve learned to prepare for the changing seasons and to take the weather in stride, and in the Dakotas, we experience almost all the wild extremes that nature has to offer. The only things we lack are earthquakes and tsunamis. We’ve got floods, calamitous hailstorms, fiercely destructive tornadoes as well as suffocating snowstorms covered, plus everything in between. We’re growers and tenders. We wake up. We move on. We wait for the seasons to change.
When my mother was diagnosed on Feb. 12 with a deadly brain tumor, I started to consider her contribution to my personality in earnest. But since my dad was being memorialized with his 8th annual Rapid City YMCA racquetball tournament the next week, I couldn’t help but think about the two of them, imperfect and glorious in their influence on my brother and me. Although they divorced when I was 13, my parents had plenty of time together to make their mark on our emerging personalities. Being children of the prairies, they brought their cultural coping skills and disciplinary techniques to the parenting table. They brought a commitment to education and learning that their own parents imbued in them, and they brought the helpful, friendly sense of community that they had observed growing up.
Matt and I learned to love learning and to play outside in any weather. We can talk to almost anyone, and we learned to respect people no matter their background. We learned that everyone has a story to tell, because our dad tended and sought the stories of a community for 38 years at the Rapid City Journal. We learned young to serve our neighbors as we went with Mom to deliver Meals on Wheels, and as Mom shifted from working in a doctor’s office to working at Rapid City Regional Hospital, we heard stories of nearly miraculous healing and heartbreaking loss as she tended the sickest babies from our town and towns up to 200 miles away.
My parents taught us to really laugh out loud, to dance and to take adventures. We hiked and climbed as a family. We worked on the garden as a family. We were forced to pick up cow manure to feed the garden, and we picked up pieces of shale for Mom to paint with tiny flowers and strawberries. We listened to every kind of music, and we learned to enjoy winter with a fireplace, a good book, or a case of Matchbox cars. Both my mom and dad taught us to get our hands dirty, to be respectful and kind but also to ask questions and view authority with a certain skepticism that forces leaders to produce results.
For all their stoic ability to endure hardship and refusal to grant us sympathy unless the sky were truly falling, Matt and I learned to be loving, helpful people who are able to pick ourselves up when everything goes to crap. You probably did, too. Most of us did. That’s just how Dakotans raise their children. I’m thankful for the opportunity to consider what I’ve been given as I ponder what I will lose now that Mom has discovered this aggressive and competitive foe in her brain.
We come from good stock, and we will face the future with cautious optimism, embracing the changing seasons just as our pioneering ancestors did before us. That’s just who we are. That’s what we were raised to do, and that’s how we’ll carry on.
Myself being a descendant of the immigrants who came across the sea to grow their future in the vast beauty of South Dakota, I so identify with this reflective retrospective. My aging parents recently spent several days caring for two of my great uncles, both bachelors, who live out on the South Dakota prairie, in small homes on what I would consider a most inhospitable, if not barren plain. One recovering from the flu and the other from pneumonia, these eighty-eight and ninety-eight year old souls have lived the very type of life of which you write. They come from the kind of stock of which you speak, as do my parents. When times are tough, they pitch in. They are examples of the enduring spirit that begs us to help out a neighbor, love our families, and forge on in the face of adversity. I , too, know this legacy. I come from good stock. Knowing this writer personally as a close friend for many years, I have experienced the joys and struggles of life as met head on by two headstrong women of the Black Hills. We both have benefitted from the shoulders on which we stand. And I must say, I am profoundly grateful for the examples set by those who have come before us, including my German and Norwegian grandparents, the lessons they taught me, and my two resilient great uncles.