Her brothers don’t want it, because the night winds come in strong. One day, Thea claims a little upstairs room for herself, her first room she wouldn’t have to share. (I should note that if the idea of Destiny feels heavy, that is equally chill and valid-the writer Margaret Atwood, for example, said recently that her junior high English teacher said, in retrospect, that Atwood “showed no particular ability in her class.”) Thea escapes the chaos of her house-with all her brothers running around-in little drips and drops: “The clamor about her drowned the voice within herself.” She studies piano with the old German professor Wunsch, and he and a few others notice special qualities in Thea: “…she had both imagination and a stubborn will, curiously balancing and interpenetrating each other…She had the power to make a great effort, to lift a weight heavier than herself.” In Willa Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, the young Swedish-American girl, Thea Kronborg grows up with a big family in the small desert town of Moonstone, Colorado during the 1800s.

The downtown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cather’s childhood home, in the early 1900s.

The song of lark