Excerpt from My Antonia Willa Cather
2 All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me:
there were no fences in those days. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the
wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the
plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all
the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs's story, but insist
that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads
always seem to me the roads to freedom.
3 I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where
the smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints
of the stem. Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree
that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and they
had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must
have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.
7 I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-grey bread she gave her family to eat. She mixed her dough, we
discovered in an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste out to bake it, she left
smears of dough sticking to the sides of the measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue
ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.
Throughout this passage the reader would MOST LIKELY describe the narrator as feeling
A)
proud and independent.
B)
jealous and discontent.
inhibited and regretful.
D)
nostalgic and reflective,
Mi