Anna never did marry. Never got around to it she’d say. But she had hundreds of kids over the years and countless intimate relationships that played out in beautiful, unexpected and deeply personal ways in places far, far away … right next door.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Germany was emerging as a world power. She was ambitious and while most of the Empire’s states were still ruled by noble families, Germany was rapidly becoming industrialized. The economy thrived, the population grew by over fifty percent in just over thirty years and in the areas of science and technology and education, Germany was the envy of Europe.

Still, the government was unpredictable and set on conquest. For every ally, it made two enemies. An alliance formed today did not rule out a declaration of war tomorrow and German troops were in remote African outposts and at war with China. Most of the Empire’s best thinking was channeled into making war and many of its most-promising thinkers were pressed into obligatory military service, a fact that would forever color Anna’s life.

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Her father had attended the university in Coblenz. He was bookish, a scholar, especially drawn to the great philosophers. He considered life a thinking pursuit and believed the answers to all questions and the solution to all worldly challenges lie waiting within the human brain. He saw his life’s work as being a catalyst for conversations about some higher meaning and so upon graduation, he took a job as assistant professor of ancient philosophy at the university, a position that offered a meager wage but infinite intellectual possibilities.

Those possibilities took a dead-end turn when he was ordered to report for duty by the German army. He had no choice in the matter, there was no such thing as a “conscientious objector” in the newly unified Germany, no recourse for a peacemaker whose weapon of choice is his mind. As destiny would have it, within a year of being forced from the philosophical to the physical world, Anna’s father would be dead amidst questionable circumstances on a battlefield in China.

Anna’s mother’s instinct upon learning of her husband’s death was to run. She had no one, save for Anna, just a toddler and a brother who had long ago emigrated to America. She and her brother exchanged letters and he offered her a place to live and a fresh start if she could get herself to America. She had no prospects, just 100 German Gold Marks, the worth of a dead German soldier, so she used it to buy passage to America. The year was 1888.

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The middle of America was a rural place, but hard work could bring success. Anna’s uncle ran a sawmill near the Turkey River in northeastern Iowa. Iowa wasn’t all cornfields, in fact, in and around its river basins the state boasted fine, thick, untouched stands of oak, elm, ash and maple trees. Uncut logs could float down the Turkey, be processed at the mill and then connect easily to the transportation engine of the nearby Mississippi River. Her uncle owned maybe fifty acres of land that encompassed the mill, a dense wooded area, a modest house and several outbuildings.

Anna’s uncle, she called him Onkie, was a bachelor and his world was an adult world. As such, Anna was a bit spoiled but smart in the way a young child is forced to be smart when they are surrounded by mostly men and women. Her mother assumed the duties of the lady of the manor, cooking and cleaning but also offering a lady’s perspective on business, social and household matters.

Anna spoke both English and German but when it came to reading and writing her uncle insisted that she focus on English. She spent much of her days alone, entertaining herself, exploring, keeping up a steady dialog between herself and her imagination. By the time she was six, she was a self-sufficient miniature adult, and unlike other children who spent all of their early years doing chores and working the farm, Anna could read and write and make up stories and picture a world far beyond the cornfields and the timber stands. “You’re a dreamer just like your father,” her mother would say.

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There was a schoolhouse not too far from Onkie’s mill in a township called Sageville. Maybe ten children attended on any given day as long as it wasn’t harvest time, or planting time, or go swimmin’ in the creek time. Not surprisingly, Anna rarely missed a day of school and, being bright and essentially a know-it-all, she became the teacher’s pet, receiving additional lessons and tutoring and attention and books … books she could take home, books that could take her where she wanted to go.

Anna and her mother lived in one of Onkie’s outbuildings, a mile or two from the sawmill. It wasn’t much but they made the best of it. Unless someone was specifically looking for it, no one would ever know it was there as it was surrounded by a thicket of trees and wild things that formed a protective canopy. Only when the sun was directly overhead would they feel its radiant warmth, like a heavenly spotlight shining on their humble little stage.

One day after school – Anna walked to and from as all of the kids did except for Tommy Ancich who rode an old mule – Anna was wandering home, her head in a book when she found herself in a strange grove of trees. It’s not that the trees were strange, it was that, after maybe fifty paces, she came to a clearing, a perfect square as if it had been carved out by a laser. About twenty feet square, there were no tree stumps and no sign of human intervention. Roughly in the center of the space, there was large flat rock, almost like an altar. You could hear the tingle of the Turkey River and fractured streams of sunlight danced and flickered on the ground. To Anna, this spot felt energized, alive, mystical. It smelled like earth with every possible shade of green and brown, the essence of growth and naturalness. With the trees forming walls and nature providing a sensory soundtrack, here was a sort of cathedral she thought.

As she sat upon the flat rock, she opened her book and thought, stories are the sacred text and the thoughts those stories create are the sacred hymns.

Anna had lost herself in a reverie that she couldn’t explain and didn’t understand, but it was near dark so she retraced her steps and found the little path that she took to school. It turned out the clearing was only a stone’s throw from the modest dwelling where Anna and her mom lived … but who would ever know?

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It was 1901 and Anna was fourteen. The country had grown, some new homesteads had sprung up around the sawmill but Anna and her mother still lived an isolated existence, but they were happy. The outbuilding had become a home, they even had indoor plumbing; mama was Onkie’s valuable business partner and Anna made some friends and was a serious student and a voracious reader.

A year or two before a crate arrived from Germany (with postage due to the tune of $5.19), it contained at least twenty books on philosophy – Hume, Descartes, Kant, Locke, Socrates, more – that belonged to Anna’s father, all in German. The unexpected delivery piqued Anna’s interest in both philosophy and her dad. For the first time, her mother talked openly about what her dad was like, what was important to him and how she believed he died. She read to Anna from the German texts and this led to a rare mother-daughter discussion … about the meaning of life, the meaning of death, war, peace, dreams.

Anna pestered her teacher about books on philosophy written in English. She spent hour upon hour in her special spot contemplating her existence along with the world’s great thinkers. By now the clearing in the woods had become an outdoor retreat. She brought over an old wooden chair and devised a handmade enclosure to protect her books from the elements; she collected wildflowers and leaves and rocks and tree bark to create a sort of shaded garden. She stored candles and matches to light the written word when darkness fell, and even if there was plenty of light, she believed the candlelight would give her a spiritual connection to the words.

♦

In less than a year’s time, the teacher at the little prairie schoolhouse had to tell Anna that her school days were done.
“Done!” Anna said, “What do you mean done?”
“Anna, I’m afraid I have nothing left to teach you. My job is to teach the sons and daughters of poor farmers how to read & write … I’m not qualified to give you the kind of advanced instruction you need.”
“So what do I do? I want to become a teacher like you … and my dad.”
“Well, I think you’re ready for college.”
“I’m just fifteen!”
“Your age doesn’t matter, let’s try.”

Together they applied to St. Mary’s Female Academy in Dubuque. The academy required an entrance interview and when the day came it was the first time Anna had ever ventured more than two miles from the sawmill. The thought of Anna being away caused her mother heartache but she knew it was destiny and there was a certain comfort in the prospect of Anna completing her father’s work. Her uncle was proud, overjoyed and volunteered to pay for her schooling. He saw education as progress and he wanted the smartest people on his side.

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In three years time, Anna earned her degree in education and she was offered a job at the primary school in Dubuque. She took a small room in town and spent the next thirty years focusing on the art of teaching and her students. In 1946 her mother died in the same simple house that gave them shelter when they first left Germany. She was buried in a simple plot on land adjacent to the sawmill. Onkie had long ago deeded the house and the acres around it to his sister and now that she was gone it belonged to Anna.

Anna had visited with her mother on most weekends over the passing decades, but now on the occasion of her death, Anna reflected on time passed. She had become an old school marm, not the crotchety kind you read about in ghost stories, but a schoolmistress just the same, married to the vocation of teaching and in many ways considering every student her own child. It all seemed to happen in a blink and Anna never analyzed it or thought for a minute to stop the bus and get off so that she could have personal things.

Now, however, she thought it best to come back to Sageville and live a life with school, students and home. The old schoolhouse had long been torn down and replaced by a more modern structure that accommodated hundreds of students who were taught everything from the ABCs to something close to physics. Anna walked there that day to inquire about employment and with her sparkling reputation and versatile experience she was welcomed almost instantly. As she walked back, on the path that was virtually unchanged from the one she scrambled over as a girl, she turned into a thicket and was soon at the Sacred Square, the clearing she used as a library and contemplation station all these many years. She would come here every time she visited her mother’s house and she was still amazed at its natural energy and the fact that, from all appearances, it had never been discovered by another being. For Anna, moving back to this home place had a lot to do with the power of this square space.

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Teachers have favorites, usually the students that are most like them. One day, after Anna been at the primary school for a number of years, she literally bumped into a little girl she had never seen before as she was emerging from her classroom. The girl was busy reading a book and didn’t see Anna walk out of her classroom door into the hallway. They had a slow-speed, injury-free collision. Anna asked, “What do you have there that’s so absorbing?” “It’s a Little House book,” said the embarrassed little girl. “Oh, I love those books,” Anna said, “but they’re best enjoyed sitting in a comfy chair.” “Yes ma’am,” replied the girl as she scurried away. The girl’s name was Juliette.

One summer Saturday Juliette had walked through town and was headed to an especially calm spot on the Turkey River where kids loved to splash around and jump from rope swings and maybe do a little fishin’ on hot summer days. Though none of the kids knew exactly where the teacher lived, the best way to get to this spot was a seldom-used path that crossed within fifty yards or so from Anna’s homestead. As Juliette passed on one side of that path, she noticed an older woman with a book walking and then quickly disappearing into the woods. “That lady looks a bit like Miss Anna,” Juliette thought.

Not being in any real hurry, Juliette crossed to the other side to the spot where the lady had entered the woods and peered in past the old maple trees. She couldn’t see a thing through the dense growth of trees and moss and all kinds of greenery fighting for sunlight and nutrients. She stepped in a little further, kind of weaving her way around stumps and tree trunks and stepping over brambles and vines and leaf-covered mounds. She wasn’t scared but she remembers thinking that she should have been.

After a few minutes, she saw a patch of sunlight, almost unnatural sunlight. She walked toward the light, gingerly, cautiously, and hiding behind a tree that was much wider than Juliette’s skinny self, she peeped around it.

In the clearing, sat Miss Anna reading a book in an old wooden chair that seemed to be a natural part of the landscape. She saw lots more books on what appeared to be nature’s bookshelves. There were candles and an old rug, weathered garden tools and little rock formations that led to nowhere.

Upon seeing all this and the old teacher she let out what she hoped would NOT be an audible gasp. No such luck.

“Is there somebody there?”
“Yes ma’am, it’s me” was the reluctant response.
“Who on earth is me … for heaven’s sake, come into the light!”
“It’s me, ma’am, Juliette.”
“Juliette? Come closer here, child. How is it that you come to this place?”
“Well, ma’am I was on my way to the river spot and, well, I saw someone who looked like you and, you walked right into the woods … and that seemed strange … and my mom says I have trouble minding my own business and …”
After a bit of silence, the awkward kind, Juliette ask, “What is this place?”
“I live not far from here and I discovered this spot when I was your age … I’m not sure what God intended, but I believe it was his idea for it to be a place where people can be alone with books … It’s not my place, I guess, well, I guess I’m just the only one that knows about it.”

“Since you’re here, why not pick up a book and join me. There are several Little House books around here somewhere.”

The only reason Juliette was going to the river in the first place was that her mom insisted that she get some exercise, that she do something other than reading. So Juliette joined Anna and, in time, she came to see the magic in the Sacred Square.

♦

A decade later, Anna was approaching seventy. She had been a teacher for over fifty years and many around her were urging her to retire. She thought such talk was nonsense and couldn’t imagine life without a job to go to and children to teach. Then one day, it was a Friday, Anna didn’t show up for class. Her colleagues were worried and since Anna never installed a phone, after school a teacher who had known Anna for a quarter century drove to her house. She found the front door unlocked but when she went inside there was no sign of Anna, but nothing in the house looked out of place.

Just the year before Juliette had graduated and was off at college, but it turns out that she was coming home for the weekend to visit. When she arrived home her mother happened to mention Anna’s absence from school the day before. It turns out Juliette has two younger sisters and one of them is in Anna’s class.

“Isn’t that strange,” her mother said. “No one can ever remember Miss Anna ever missing work and now she’s disappeared.”

Juliette said, “Mom, I have an idea … Will you come with me?”

Juliette and her mom walked briskly through town and then parallel to the river. “Where are we going?” her mother asked. “To Miss Anna’s house.” “The teachers already looked there and there was no sign of her.” “She has another home,” Juliette replied.

Pointing to the woods, Juliette and her mom crossed the path. “What is this place?” mom inquired. The two ducked into the woods and, just like every other time Juliette came here she quickly saw the clearing and the light that shone down upon it.

As they emerged from the grove, there she sat.

Juliette’s mom covered her mouth. Juliette simply said, “Oh Miss Anna …”

Anna had a book on her lap and you could convince yourself that she was having a literary daydream if it weren’t for her paper white skin and the fact that she wasn’t breathing.

Juliette went to her, calmly, deliberately. She knelt by the side of her chair and gently touched her hand. She closed the book and gently removed it from her stiffening hands. She couldn’t read the title of the book, it was in German, but she recognized the name of the author: Kant, Immanuel Kant the German philosopher.

Juliette’s mother said, “We must get her out of here.” Juliette said, “No, we should read to her first.”

And they did. In a square patch of nature, at the altar of intelligence and imagination, the young girl read to the old woman, and there was just the three of them but the spirit of the moment harnessed the energy of the universe and every angelic force rushed into the Sacred Square and listened to the story.

And when the story ended, Juliette placed the German book back on Anna’s lap and said, “May we all leave this life in the company of the people we love … and it’s really okay if all of those people live in books.”

Photo credit: Kerrythis on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA