I was here to drink in the prairie landscape that fired author Willa Cather's imagination and shaped her writing long after she went east.
Cather was 9 when her family left Virginia and traveled west, settling first outside of Red Cloud and then moving into town. She would later write: “Sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.”

My Cather immersion began with a Cather Foundation tour given by a young Nebraska-born and bred book lover and historian who took me to the Cather family home. I peeked into Willa's top-floor bedroom to see the flowered wallpaper that she loved has been carefully restored and gazed at her books and games.

Then we were off to six other beautifully preserved buildings -- a church, a train depot and more -- that figured into Cather's life and her writing.

Cather spent much of her career on the eastern seaboard, but she never forgot how Red Cloud had formed her. She published a series of Nebraska novels, including “O, Pioneers!” and won the Pulitzer Prize for "One of Ours."

But she always missed her hometown, writing in 1945 that she preferred it "to any of the beautiful cities in Europe."