Small Wonders
Stories about who we are and where we come from.
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A Civil War hospital near Chattanooga goes nearly forgotten, but the traumas from that war still color our lives. -
In response to the western push of slavery, a new liberal party emerges. -
The wonders and virtues of the American buffalo, Bison bison bison. -
There were already so many children and so much to do that Alice Kirk Grierson told her husband, in a burdened letter, that she couldn't help but fear their reunion again because of what she guessed would inevitably occur. -
His simple grace became legendary, so that a man named Martin was somehow moved to place Dutch Fred's remains where, he thought, they should be, where they are today: on a hill beside the Little Sioux, on land he always dreamed of. An immigrant. An American immigrant. -
If you can believe it, once there were two churches here: "the high church," sitting atop the bluff behind the one we're looking at, and this one, "the low church," both of them both old and Danish, and each as bull-headed as the other. Religious fights are never all bucolic. Typical better describes. -
The inescapable premise here is that mother and father, on a trail to Zion, on their way west will carry immense grief, and that what they’re suffering can be bested only by hope. Grief and hope. We live by grief and hope. -
Margaret F. Kelley came to Fremont, NE, in May of 1870 and settled on a farm on Maple Creek. Four years later, she and the family were visited by grasshoppers. "I had never formed an idea of anything so disastrous," she wrote in her memoir. That's just another way of saying that, to her, the grasshopper plague was beyond unimaginable.
Dr. Jim Schaap doesn’t know what on earth happens to his time these days, even though he should have plenty of it, retired as he is (from teaching literature and writing at Dordt College, Sioux Center, IA). If he’s not at a keyboard, most mornings he’s out on Siouxland’s country roads, running down stories that make him smile or leave him in awe. He is the author of several novels and a host of short stories and essays. His most recent publications include Up the Hill: Folk Tales from the Grave (stories), and Reading Mother Teresa (meditations). He lives with his wife Barbara in Alton, Iowa.