Naming the Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship

Naming the Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship

By Caroline Marwitz

Finalist, 2001 Willa Award for Memoirs and Essays, from Women Writing the West!

“There once was an old woman who lived in the eye of the wind. Breezes swirled leaves in whirlwinds down her street and gales scoured the prairie, ripping the shutters of her neighbor’s house, but her yard and house were unscathed. Her house was a rosy sandstone fortress that budged not an inch under the raking teeth of the Wyoming wind, though year by year its stony walls lost grain after grain of pale pink sand. The stone was the pink-orange color of sunset, quarried from the hills east of Laramie. The woman and her husband had built the house long ago when they were young.”

Growing up on the edge of Laramie, Caroline Marwitz felt lost among the housing tracts that were swallowing up the prairie she loved. But she found her compass in a woman her grandmother’s age who taught her about courage and curiosity. Through this friendship, forged on the Wyoming winds, she looks closely at where she lives, its natural and human history, and earns the right to call it home.

• 0-931271-57-6 • 224 pp • trade paper • $13.95 ORDER NOW

Naming the Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship

By Caroline Marwitz

“‘I belong. I belong,’ says Caroline Marwitz, her blood singing a plains tune titled Naming the Winds. She sees her life as ordinary, yet filled with confusions familiar to every honest reader. Yet her story of how she came to love the open spaces draws us to follow her across the Wyoming plains, reassured by a soft voice saying, ‘Honey, just do what you can with what you’ve got.’”
•• Linda M. Hasselstrom, author of Feels Like Far