WINTER WHEAT by Mildred Walker (fiction)

This is a lovely coming of age book about a young girl living in the drylands wheat country of central Montana during World War II.  The war was a time when everyone had to grow up in a hurry, young men brought up to run farms were shipped off to fight in Europe or Asia, young women were faced with greater responsibility, often taking over chores their brothers once did. The book has been described as a classic story of the American West.  It was written in 1944, contemporary at the time it was written.  The picture it gives us of rural life and values is a true one.  The novel has been reissued several times and it's slow paced cadence is reminiscent of the writing of Willa Cather.

Ellen Webb, a strong willed and capable  young woman is going off to college, something her parents have worked hard and saved for. The fortunes of the yearly wheat crop determined whether Ellen would go to university.  Once there she meets an aristocratic and wealthy young man, Gil Borden.  Gil and his parents couldn't be more different than Ellen and her family.  Gil is buttoned up and staid, Ellen is ebullient and open.
Ellen's parents met during WWI when her father, a college boy from Vermont, was sent to the Russian front.  He brought home a Russian bride and they decided to migrate west to take advantage of cheap farm land.  The novel is Ellen's story: her relationship with Gil and her parents, her love of the land, her disappointments and her dawning understanding of her parents and their mutual love. What at first seems such a quiet story is full of life's lessons.

Throughout the book, Ellen's attention and awareness of the hands of those around her become symbolic of the class differences among the characters.  She often describes the rough hands of her mother and neighbors.  She muses, "Our hands, all moving, seemed to say things to each other. Gil's hands didn't seem to belong with ours."  In another passage, "I watched his hands, long and carefully cared for and shapely.  Maybe I loved them because they were so different from any hands I had known."

Ellen lived through hard times, times of failed harvests and of losing loved ones, of hard winters and life-changing disappointments.  She is a member of what we have come to call "the greatest generation."  This is a beautifully written book of a way of life that is probably lost in this era of mega farms run like industries.  I recommend it to all who would like to see a slice of the past quite different from our fast-paced society.