I have been reading a book by John E. Carter about Solomon D. Butcher, credited for photographing the “American Dream.” I highly suggest you read about him and look into the eyes of his work.
I looked at this photograph a very long time. The snow blowing outdoors all around our Nebraska farm created even more opportunities to study the image.
Quite a picture. The woman’s distraught face, and the stress. The worn darkness of the man’s skin, and almost traumatized eyes.
The tired faces of the parents are contrasted with one smiling child, and the other two children more stoic like their mom and dad. Isn’t that something? That smile. Making its way through the toughness depicted there.
So that’s my story today. I am sharing one I wrote below in a passionate, angry, tearful moment in the past that still speaks true to me today. I still ask this fervent question, “Do you see her?”
Because while the winds of the Great Plains don’t beat my face like those in Solomon’s pictures anymore, this is the stuff (love it or hate it) woven into my DNA. I wasn’t of ancestral blood indigenous to this “Nebraskaland.” I am a sojourner here too, through my ancestors’ cells that are carried on in me. Ancestors who were promised something, maybe desperate, maybe pioneers, maybe it was all presented to them bigger than life. And that’s why a ship over the ocean seemed feasible. Because the hope of the new world became so great.
But that hope and “Manifest Destiny” has another pulsating vein running through it, a true story that we all still face today. The stern truth that building a nation is a bloodbath. It’s a war. And yet, it’s humanity and love underneath all of that harsh truth and we all return to the soil after the fight is over. Finally, there, six feet under, we find our oneness.
Maybe we should ask ourselves if we really see one another at all. That’s what this writing is about. That’s the question I offer up today … “Do you see her?”
Do you see her?
She steps outside the door and shakes the rug.
She is the one in the kitchen, staring out the window at the wide-open, Great Plains.
Open, but still not fully open to her.
She hauls the water to the house.
She lifts the children to feed from her breasts.
She mends cuts and tends to chores.
Do you see her?
She bore a dozen young and lost five to the Great Plains and two within her womb.
When needed, she drove the horses.
When needed, she drove the tractor.
Sometimes she is driven mad.
She can also be found hunched over a garden, fighting weeds.
She can throw bales and clean up the baby’s throw up.
Do you see her?
She is not a ghost.
She is still real.
She is a woman in a farmhouse today.
She is looking out a window at windswept plains.
While the world now feels the pangs of entrapment, she already knows how to operate half-free amongst unopened minds.
She knows how to tiptoe amongst tradition.
She knows how to pray it changes.
She knows who to keep her mouth shut around.
She knows how to hope.
She knows how to help and keep humble the way the pews prefer.
Do you see her?
She’s putting on a smile.
She’s looking in the closet and dusting under church clothes, business clothes and chore clothes.
She is educated.
She is not using her education.
They aren’t ready for that sort of thing.
She is surrounded, but alone.
She is worlds within worlds and thoughts within thoughts.
Do you see her?
She knows who really does and who does not.
She knows more than it seems.
She holds onto barbed wire and big dreams.
She holds on and keeps farmhouses from falling in.
She holds on for dear life.
Do you see her?
She’s even greater than the Great Plains.
Set her free and we will all be.
Free.
Photo taken from the book by John E. Carter, “Solomon Butcher Photographing the American Dream.”
Copyright© 2025 All Rights Reserved, Kerry Hoffschneider
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