My grandmother loved to read, which is the thing that made me feel closest to her as a child. I grew up in another state and didn’t see her much. But I have always loved books, and I made a point of reading the ones that I knew she loved, like Anne of Green Gables and, a lesser-known book, A Girl of the Limberlost.
The latter book is a novel by Gene Stratton Porter published in 1909, nine years before my grandmother was born. It tells the story of a country girl growing up in poverty who manages—through industriousness and a great deal of luck—to leave home and attend high school, a journey which affords her countless opportunities for adventure and romance.
It’s not difficult to see why such a story would have appealed to my grandmother, who missed out on her own chance at an education and any opportunity to leave the farm life into which she was born.
Raised on a northern Kentucky tobacco farm and then moving a few roads over to marry another tobacco farmer, my mother’s mother cooked on a coal stove and used an outhouse. She didn’t live in a house with an indoor bathroom until she was in her 50s.
Though smart and bookish, my grandmother did not attend high school, either because she was a girl or because she was poor, probably both. She loved the schooling she had; her family allowed her to repeat the eighth grade when she longed to continue her studies.
My mother keeps one of her mother’s report cards from that last year of her education, a handwritten letter A in each column.
When my mother was nine years old, her father died suddenly from a heart attack. According to the stories, my grandmother didn’t shed a tear. She got up the next day and went to work. The tobacco farm had to be sold; with three children to raise, she couldn’t run it herself.
Reading A Girl of the Limberlost as a child, what I enjoyed most was the girl’s obsession with butterflies and moths. She collects rare ones to pay for her schooling. As a massive nerd, here was something I could understand—a love of school and nature!
After reading the book, I asked for a field guide about butterflies and a photo album for collecting images of all the butterflies I planned to find, just like the girl in the Limberlost. My parents also bought me a butterfly net, though I was too afraid of harming them to catch one.
I didn’t get many photographs of butterflies for my book—there weren’t a plethora of species in my suburban yard in Asheville, North Carolina. But I did stumble one day across something miraculous.
The image on the cover of my copy of A Girl of the Limberlost is a painting of the girl with hands outstretched, trying to delicately cup an imperial moth— a lovely species, large and gold with patches of purplish-brown.
This moth was a feature character in A Girl of the Limberlost. It was such a rare and beautiful moth that its sale would help the girl achieve her dreams; it’s the trophy she seeks for much of the book.
I was startled to find this exact moth sunning itself one afternoon in the shade of my grandmother’s ancient car in the parking lot of her retirement apartment complex.
The moth from the book my grandmother loved napping by her car! I took it as a sign, I’m not sure of what, but something about its discovery felt profound to my ten-year-old mind. The photos I took of it became my most prized, labeled in my childhood scrawl: “Family—Saturnidae [sic], Species—Eacles imperialis.”
The metaphor of rebirth is heavy-handed in A Girl of the Limberlost. The girl’s mother even wraps herself in a sort of cocoon at one point, and when she emerges she is transformed, made beautiful and kind and ready to join her daughter in a life of wealth and privilege.
There were no such miracles in my grandmother’s life, but to appreciate this book she must have been able to imagine for herself a different life.
In the 1960s, there were few jobs in rural Kentucky for a woman without a high school diploma and three children at home. After my grandfather died, my grandmother cleaned houses and the church nearby.
She took a job cooking lunches at the local middle school. Every day she made yeast rolls from scratch to feed the schoolchildren, and often she would bring home the school’s leftovers to feed her own family. No matter how poor they were, my grandmother made certain her children never went hungry.
And the food that she cooked–whether for her own children or those in the school–was infused with love and a piece of her soul, as is true of the best cooks in any kitchen.
A quiet, no-nonsense woman, my grandmother never spoke to me much, but I recall her acts of kindness and love, like when she would feed me, serving me sliced strawberries on a styrofoam plate with artificial sweetener for dipping.
She died when I was in college, and I sometimes wonder what she would have thought had she lived to see me travel and earn multiple college degrees. I doubt she would have said much—she was not a talker—and perhaps she would have thought me too wild, too rootless, like many others do.
I like to think, though, that she would have been at least a little proud, and that perhaps she would have been in awe, like I often am, of the changes that a couple of generations can make.
She introduced me to books that sparked my imagination as much as they must have hers, albeit possibly in different ways. She must have seen A Girl of the Limberlost as a fantasy come to life: a girl escaping her chrysalis of poverty and taking flight into a world of possibility.
For me, the book delivered the fantasy of a city girl who longs to tramp through nature. It taught me that girls can work in the woods.
And perhaps it birthed another idea, one that would serve me later in life: life-altering opportunities are not given to everyone—they are as rare as this girl’s imperial moth—and when one comes along, you grab it with both hands and hold on.