Wendy Bilen - Finding Josie

NOT QUITE A MILE OFF ROUTE 21 in south central North Dakota sits the town of Carson. It doesnt bustle, buzz, or shakeit sits, as if resting on the porch after a Sunday potluck. Carson, pop. 319, is a far hour from Bismarck, in a good year nestled among buttes of electric green dotted with Holsteins and Herefords. The county map runs bloodshot blue with creeks leading to the Heart and Cannonball Rivers, which lie underneath a grid of narrow two-lane roads peppered with wild sage or leafy spurge, the soil near their roots slowly burying chunks of petrified wood.

Deep ditches show where the Northern Pacific once ran, long since rerouted. Now the town is quiet, and old grain elevators lean in as if listening hard, tornado damage from years ago still unfixed even though the insurance company paid out. Main Street leads into and slices through town like a spine. On one side a blue and yellow sign by the Future Farmers of America welcomes visitors, while across the street the Carson Flour Mill, once producing seventy-five barrels a day, stands empty and gray as it has for nearly half a century. In the center of town, storefronts resemble the Old West, vertical slats of dark wood in boxy arrangements, a renovation courtesy of a benefactor thirty years ago. Those who explore the other roads in town will find a grocery, a post office, and a nine-room motel but come up short looking for streetlights, movie theaters, and libraries. A blond-bricked county courthouse calls Carson home, too, but that is hard to missits at the dead end of Main.

I have come to Carson because Im looking for my grandmother.

I am her youngest daughters daughter, and though I knew her for the first twenty-five years of my life, it took me another ten to realize that I never knew her at all. She was, I now understand, a woman proud and humble, loving and unaffectionate, strict and visionary, joyful and troubleda woman held together by contradictions like an arch and its capstone. I didnt know any of this when as a child I visited her and my grandfather on their farm outside La Crosse, Wisconsin, and I held down a squeaky mattress on their upstairs landing, well past bedtime, staring at strips of ugly flowered wallpaper rebelling in curls and tears. The ceiling hung low, also pasted in flowers, and slanting toward me so that I could almost touch it with my head on the pillow. On many of these nights the landing door was open to the roof and cricket song, and I fell asleep to voices murmuring at the kitchen table downstairs, the smell of coffee still fresh, waking only at the noise of the creaking stairs when my parents came to bed. In the early morning I awoke to the sounds of voices, mismatched dishes clanging, and containers of milk and butter and unknown sauces or spreads coming out of the refrigerator. I didnt think about the wonder sitting downstairs on a vinyl chair, kneading dough or peeling boiled eggs with a paring knife. I just knew I wanted to be at the table.

My mother was the child who moved away, so I saw my grandmother only a few times a year. We always loved going to visit, my brother and I, and even now in his thirties when he returns he still gets giddy about twenty miles away, even though my grandmother has been gone for many years. The farm on which she and my grandfather lived was another world to us, a couple of kids from suburban Chicago; it was exciting and smelly and scary and exhilarating. We could disappear for hours, and no one would mind. It was hard to get into trouble, though my brother managed a few times. Because almost nothing was off-limits to touch or eat or try, we milked cows and drove tractors and baled hay in short sleeves and thought we were big shots. Our cousins laughed quietly.