Sweet Land

Whenever I've felt that moving abroad is tough and lonely and all those other self-pitying things that we expat wives notch up on our imaginary totem of hard-done-byness, I've always managed to find some comfort in comparing my lot to those of women in bygone ages. I always hated history at school, and wrote it off as boring and pointless. I now increasingly see the huge value of learning about the past, about past lives. Boy, does it make you thankful to be a 21st century woman.

The pioneers, those women who sat in covered wagons with their children, bumping along day after day after day, full of uncertainty, fear, loneliness, illness. No email, no telephone, no blogging, no antibiotics, no heating, no air conditioning. How pathetic they would think we modern day women are! "I don't understand the school grading system. I can't get decent sausages. The bacon is really fatty. Air travel is so expensive." I hang my head in shame.

Last night, I watched a movie "Sweet Land" - look it up on Netflix. It's set in the 1920s, when Inge arrives in Minnesota to marry a farmer she has never met. Because of her German background, she is unable to get the necessary papers to allow her to immigrate or marry. The local minister preaches against her from the pulpit ("her coffee is too black"), and life is bleak. It is a beautiful movie, which I thoroughly recommend if you're not in a hurry (emotionally, I mean, at 110 minutes the film itself isn't unusually long). Slow-moving (oh how those days must have dragged for her), with lingering shots of the land, the houses, the faces of the characters, it's full of the detail of life at the time, domestic, social and agricultural.

I loved Inge. Beautiful, composed, dignified, standing up for herself as best she can, treasuring her few possessions, a gramophone player and a smart hat. She arrives in a strange and hostile land, speaking only a few words of English, but has been sensible enough to include in her handful of learned phrases "I could eat a horse". That speaks to me of a woman who, facing her life's biggest adventure and biggest hardship, shrewdly and wisely decided where her priorities lay.