Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin....

Tonight I opened up my ancient copy of Little House in the Big Woods. I had almost given up my complete set for lost. They were packed in a box twelve years ago and because I was away at school, I had no idea that they were then stuffed in the attic, where they remained until a month ago.

Somehow, they survived and when I finally unpacked the box on Saturday, they got proper storage on the bookcase Randy made last fall.

The smell made me cry. Pay that part no mind - I've been prone to tears easily these days, and I didn't smell the books until tonight after a series of other things made me nostalgic. It was inevitable. The musty smell of old books is my favorite smell. It is comforting, it is peaceful, it smells like "home," which for a very long time in my childhood had no particular meaning and was more easily attached to the cabins and castles in my imagination, all built by others' words.

I know a lot of people who grew up on L.M. Montgomery or Frances Hodgson Burnett, C.S. Lewis or other authors. My formative reading was all Laura Ingalls Wilder. I grew up in places so similar to the ones Laura did. In fact, I spent most of the ages between 2 and 9 in northern Oklahoma, not thirty miles from the homestead chronicled in Little House on the Prairie.

There is something about pioneer stories that is so achingly familiar to me. I have discovered in recent years that an open prairie and wide sky speak volumes to me. I long for the silence there - but of course, if you're from those places, you know there is no real silence. There is just a different kind of noise.

Laura's stories fueled my imagination early on in life, and helped shape the wanderlust that I experience even now (you can blame it primarily on my dad's company, but Laura definitely helped).

I look forward to this re-read with something very like love. I feel like every kid should have to read these books - but I figure, everyone has to have their own Laura Ingalls Wilder (or L.M. Montgomery, etc), their own adventure with reading, have their imaginations grow on their own terms. And I know from long personal experience that what I got out of these books is not what someone else will get out of them.

A couple of years ago, during a phase of heavy biography reading, I sought out a book on Laura. And just reading the reactions and reviews on Amazon made me decide against it. They were positive, for the most part, but in reading them I discovered that Laura, for me, lives just in the pages of the books she wrote. I do not need to know the rest - or rather, what I know of Laura comes from her and from Rose, and others' considered opinions may spoil it all, good or bad.

I did not have flowers or anything else to leave on her grave when I went two summers ago. Only because I did not know that I would end up there, until I found it. I might have taken wildflowers with me. I might have taken a penny. A piece of ribbon candy. I don't know. Standing there I closed my eyes, and imagined I could hear Pa's fiddle, and little Laura's laugh over the prairie wind.

As I type this tonight, some part of me feels like getting in a car, and going out to whatever open space I can get to. This is not infrequent on my part. I feel like Charles Ingalls would understand and encourage me in this whim. 


These pictures represent one of the first times I knew, really and truly knew, I had married the right man. We went on this epic road trip through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri on our way to my family reunion in 2008, and I kept finding places like these to stop. They had no meaning for him whatsoever - Little House was just the tv show to him, he didn't even realize there were books - and he still stopped with me, lingered, took pictures and listened to me wax nostalgic.


The Wilders' grave, in Missouri. Taken July 2008.


Rocky Ridge Farm, the home that Almanzo built for Laura and their daughter, Rose. Taken July 2008.


The replica log cabin that sits approximately where the Little House on the Prairie actually was. The homesite was mostly barren when rediscovered, but territorial maps and records helped historians find the location, and the well onsite, as well as the foundation for the home, were still there. You can visit it, too, if you're driving in deep south Kansas. Taken July 2008.

(more on the Little House site can be found here)