Dear friends,

In the past three months, my maternal grandparents, Jim and Elna Young, have both come to the end of their walk in this world, my grandmother just this past Sunday. They lived long and rich lives and so my grief is tempered by gratitude. I am sorry, however, that they will not see my writing about Nebraska come to fruition, because their influence and their lifelong residence in southeast Nebraska did more to encourage my attention to my homeplace than anything else. For most of my upbringing, we lived only about a mile from them, and their love of our scrubby little hometown of Milford marked me deeply. In tribute to them, then, here are some yet-unpublished excerpts from that work, stitched together from different chapters, on the theme of local culture and their life in the place.

In his essay, "The Work of Local Culture," Wendell Berry describes a favorite landmark on one of his regular walks: an old galvanized bucket hanging on a fence post. In 1988, when Berry published the essay, the bucket was probably at least fifty years old. Berry treasures it because "what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth." As leaves and nuts and bird droppings have collected in the bucket over decades, the bucket has accumulated its own tiny patch of rich black soil. Berry has heard the story of how the bucket came to be left on that post, after it was used to boil eggs for dinner for a group of hands working in his grandfather's tobacco fields. And so the bucket is both agriculturally and culturally suggestive—it has gathered earth, and stories, and memories, just by staying where it is over the passage of years.

For Berry, the old galvanized bucket is a sign of the kind of work a community must do to make itself a flourishing membership. He comments: "A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—that will be its culture."

Out of such a community can come the kind of sensibility that says, in the words of Berry's poem "Stay Home": "I am at home. Don't come with me. / You stay home too." Or such a culture might say, like Berry's poem "The Wild Geese": "What we need is here." ...

One place has always meant the most to me in my own critical view of American political economy and Nebraskan transience, and it's the village of Nelson, Nebraska, where my mother grew up. Nelson lies in extreme south-central Nebraska near the Kansas border and Cather's hometown of Red Cloud. The closest thing even approaching a large city is Hastings, population 25,000 and forty-five minutes away; getting to Nebraska's metropolitan centers in the eastern part of the state takes two hours and more. My grandfather served in the Army during the Korean War, though he was never deployed. He had intended to become a dairy farmer, but while he was in the Army, his father precipitously sold the family farm near Beatrice, leaving him searching for a new career. He completed a pharmacy degree at the University of Nebraska, worked at a pharmacy in Lincoln for a time, and bought the drugstore in Nelson when my mother was four years old, in 1965. He raised his family in the town from that time until he could no longer make a living at it in 1979, at which time he moved the family to the Lincoln area and took up employment with a large grocery store chain. As his oldest grandchild, I remember him when he was still in his working days—we would visit him in his pharmacy at the Russ's Market on 17th and Washington, wait until he was done with a customer to receive a smile and a story. Working at Russ's always bored him compared to owning his own store, not to mention the ways that the profession of pharmacist changed from the 1950s to the 1990s, going from a highly technical process of compounding drugs to something that often felt like pill-counting. He was happy to retire early from that job, but then not always so happy to be retired. I think he would have liked keeping his own drugstore back in Nelson all along.

My mother's stories of growing up in Nelson served as nothing less than my Eden narrative. Though the town's population peaked in 1900 at about a thousand residents, in the 60s and 70s it was still a functional small town of 700 souls. It had two grocery stores, a couple of restaurants, a feed store, a doctor's office, an attorney, a movie theatre, a swimming pool, and of course Young's Pharmacy As the seat of Nuckolls County, Nelson had the county courthouse, a modest stucco building, and among the brick downtown storefronts was one with a series of whimsical stone faces carved upon it including President Teddy Roosevelt. On the southern side of town was a large park containing the pool, sports fields, and a playground. On the edge of the park flowed the river, crossed by a suspension bridge and featuring a preserved log cabin. Near the park, my grandfather helped lay out a city golf course, featuring a Nebraska distinctive—sand greens. On the eastern edge of town, near the Catholic parish and several of the town's other churches, a long raised concrete walk helped funeral processions cross a modest ravine to come to the single town cemetery. Farms and ranches made up the surrounding countryside, while much of the town's housing stock was large, Victorian or early twenteth-century two-story homes....

My grandparents owned a large foursquare house close to downtown built around the turn of the century, with servants' steps and a balcony on the back. They purchased a vacant lot across the street where they tended a large garden and orchard; they kept chickens, bees, and even a pig. My mother and her four siblings rode bikes and sleds down the hill that traversed the north-south axis of town, spent long summer afternoons at the pool, and were in and out of my grandfather's pharmacy and many of the town's houses and businesses. My grandfather fished the creek, once memorably surprising my grandmother with a large catfish in the upstairs bathtub, served his neighbors in the pharmacy, and for a time held the role of mayor.

Young's Pharmacy welcomed its patrons with two wide display windows framing a central door, a pattern still visible in many main street storefronts today. On the brick wall facing the street, a large, hand-painted sign beckoned onlookers to YOUNG'S DRUGS | FOUNTAIN | SERVICE. A bench in front of the sign welcomed loiterers and loafers to take their ease on a sunny day. Inside, the entryway rose slightly to the door and was adorned with a tile mosaic. The pharmacy area was elevated still more, so that patrons could see my grandfather at work in his white coat. The store also held a soda fountain from which my grandfather or his soda jerks (my mother, who worked in the shop on weekends from the age of 12, and her siblings) could serve malts, shakes, and handmade Cokes. The store also sold paperback books—I grew up reading copies of many books, including Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, that my mom had as discards from the pharmacy, the covers torn off to be sent back to publishers.

I have two photos of my grandfather in the pharmacy, one from the local newspaper when he had just taken over the pharmacy, the other probably closely contemporary with it. In both, my grandfather stands very upright, a thin smile on his lips. He is clean-shaven with a close haircut attesting to the recency of his military service. In his horn-rimmed glasses, white button-down, and a thin tie, he looks very 1950s, and young, young—as he was, then, a younger man than I am now. He looks very different from the man I knew, who in retirement grew a long, gray beard and mainly wore seed-company hats and flannel shirts. I could say very much about that man, but that is not the story I am telling here. What I will say is this: he was a beautiful man, funny and gregarious and talented. The man I knew and the man in those old photos have alike disappeared into that great mystery we call the past. He is lost to me, as the life those photos represent is lost to my family. Though I could tell many stories of him here, for now I prefer to consider the whole of his family's life in Nelson. His life and his beauty are captured in that story, I think, or I hope they are. They live very clearly in my memory, even though they are lost to me now.

The photos I have don't provide many details of the physical space of the pharmacy: they are pictures of my grandfather, not the unremarkable storefront he operated. But I can glean a few details from them. One image shows him behind a counter, with dozens of small boxes on narrow metal shelves behind him, presumably prescription drugs. On the counter I can make out a display selling copies of TV Guide. Few other labels are readable, but the space looks both neat and full of options. It looks like the type of store that would be pleasantly surprising to find in a small town today. The other image, depicting my grandfather somewhere in the middle of the store, fills in a few other details. Heavy wooden shelves surround him, holding bandages and an assortment of bottles: perhaps over-the-counter medicines, or household goods. A flourescent light fixture hangs on a chain from high ceilings. Again, labels are mainly illegible but the array of options speaks to a thriving business.

It is a strange thing to try to reconstruct memories of memories. I never saw the inside of my grandfather's pharmacy, never visited him at work there, never drank a Coke from the soda fountain. That time and experience passed away long before I was born. Yet those memories wove in and out of the story of my childhood, appearing in glimpses or fragments always. Memories of the time were a standard of family conversation, especially for my mother, who felt keenly the loss of that time of her life. She would tell us about working in the pharmacy, about the taste of real soda-fountain drinks, about her dog Fred, who would go looking for my grandfather all over town and get impounded, again and again. The store was open six days a week, but service to neighbors was a constant. My grandfather never refused to fill a prescription for someone in need, even late in the evening or on a Sunday. From my mother's stories, I sense that her family, if not the center of the community as such, was certainly woven deeply into it.

It was not to last. But that is a story for a longer telling than I can give it here.

My grandmother was a quieter personality than her husband, quicker to listen and enjoy the conversation of others than to speak herself. In a generation of women who embraced margarine and packaged foods of all kinds, she marked our whole family with a love of home cooking and whole foods long before it was trendy. She was the only person I knew growing up who liked things like tripe and tongue and lutefisk. In her quiet way, she was a person of deep community, as she tended flower gardens on margins and scraps of abandoned land all over Milford, beautifying our community for no other reward than her gratification and that of her neighbors. She sewed and quilted, played the piano and violin, and was no mean hand at darts. We grandkids considered it a rite of passage when we could beat her. She was a person of many small but meaningful abilities, a person who made order and beauty about her. And though she was an unsentimental person, little given to overt displays of affection, I felt her love deeply. When my family moved to Iowa, she wrote me regular letters on her typewriter and made me a quilt inscribed with my own words, sent to her: "I miss you every single day." In my senior year of high school, she tried mightily to convince me to attend the community college in Milford, though it had no programs that appealed to me—I was never going to be a mechanic or do nondestructive testing—and my plan was to attend school only about forty minutes away. She did not want me to move even that far. Now, my life having carried me much further from her than that, I regret I did not consider her wishes for me more carefully.

My grandparents were people who did the work of local culture, perhaps in no small part because of their past life in Nelson. My grandfather plowed neighbors' driveways all winter well into his eighties; my grandmother beautified the town with perennial flowers in margins and scraps of public land. I could go on, and in the book, perhaps I will.

My own impulse toward the work of local culture has been the gift of my grandparents. Though the course of my life carried me far from them in a variety of ways, I am who I am because they were who they were. I am drawn back to Nebraska as I am because they never left, because they loved it as they did.

Memory eternal.