On the Move, With the Ingalls on My Mind

If I was a pioneer crossing the trail, I would surely be one of those cluttering the landscape with my too-many possessions I'd be forced to dispose of along the way. Moving day occurred in our household on April 16, 2012, but with so many possessions to bring to our new "homestead" moving day will be more like moving month. But I've already slept in our lavender colored bedroom, sat in the start of my Southwestern themed library/office, even changed my address for my Vegetarian Times subscription (priorities!), had morning coffee in a royal blue mug on my lady bug table cloth overlooking the patio and garden, and lied on the bed in our prairie-inspired guest bedroom complete with a now cherished calico quilted wall hanging found at an estate sale. That room was my idea of course. I don't think Steve would have dreamt up a Laura Ingalls Wilder-inspired guest bedroom. I kept telling him on our Southwest trip he was "my Almanzo" to which he kept saying, "Who?"

Thank goodness for Wendy McClure for getting me hooked on these Little House books after penning The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. While I'm sad I did not read the series as a child even though I was an avid fan of the show, reading them as an adult has been just as pleasurable. I've been thinking a lot about the Ingalls family, not just because I recently read Laura Ingalls Wilder's marvelous By the Shores of Silver Lake, which documents their journey to South Dakota, but because the Ingalls family moved so often in their lifetime and as Laura has said the Little House books appeal is that they are about "home, that dream of home we all share."

I've moved very little and across few frontiers in comparison. No childhood displacements and having commuted to my local college, I moved to my first apartment in my early twenties, then moved to another apartment around 30 (both times living alone), then in with Steve (and his roommate! - why I've been extremely eager to move out for privacy and more than one bathroom!) in September when my lease was up until we could find another two family. What was supposed to be a very temporary situation was drawn out for months by the bank. Roommate (thankfully) is staying put at the old homestead, and we have a nice couple living above us and Steve and I have privacy at last with the first floor all to ourselves.

Wherever she went, Ma took out her coveted china shepherdess. You can buy your own china shepherdess on the online gift shop of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society (and even a Charlotte doll!) You can also get a tin cup just like they got on Christmas from the Ingalls Homestead. I can spend (waste?) as much time on these Little House gift sites as I do looking up retro-inspired goods on the Vermont Country Store or looking up key words like, "butterfly," "calico" or "birds" on Etsy.com. I've never even purchased anything, I'm just fascinated by beautiful things that make a house a home. I like things that make it all "snug" and "cozy" like Laura always described.

It got me to thinking what is my china shepherdess, and I'm not sure that I have one. I definitely have a host of cherished items: books, wardrobe (much loved vintage), artwork, tea things. I think the calico wall hanging will be a favorite item. Do you have your own version of a china shepherdess?

Laura felt unsettled in the town and longed for the wide open prairie fields. I feel frequently unsettled by the crowded roads in New Jersey, the crowds of people in New York City and the pace of modern life. I do share a bit of Pa's and Laura's urge to wander. Never having lived outside of New Jersey, I long for the Western frontiers. I've talked to Steve about relocating eventually elsewhere (we've talked about upstate New York, Vermont and even somewhere in the West). Ma didn't want to go further west in the books because she wanted a formal school (although with Ma being teacher I always wondered why home schooling wasn't an option). We worry about schools too when the time comes to start a family. I could write a lengthy blog post (possibly an entire blog!) about things I never learned in my public school education.

I think of how different Laura's worries are than mine. She sure never had to ponder things like, when they married, did she or Almanzo have the better healthcare plan? Would she be able to afford to stay home with baby Rose?

Pa enjoyed many aspect of modernizing life, like how train travel could transport the family in one morning what would take a week by wagon. I love how we can communicate across a medium the Ingalls could have never dreamed of, but also want to take my time admiring my prairie, even if that's our humble backyard that looks out into woods. With all the unsettledness of the year, my blog has taken on a slower pace, but I'm enjoying being online less. I will definitely continue blogging, but I'll be puttering around in the garden, cooking more, writing letters (I'm the worst pen pal ever, sorry you know who!) and spending time with Laura and other great writers like her.

"The dishes were done. Laura carried the dishpan some distance from the back door and flung waste water over the grass where tomorrow's sun would dry it. The first stars were pricking through the pale sky. A few lights twinkled yellow in the little town, but the whole great plain of the earth was shadowy. There was hardly a wind, but the air moved and whispered to itself in the grasses. Laura almost knew what it said. Lonely and wild and eternal were land and water and sky and the air blowing."

Lonely and wild and eternal a life I often long for.

Calico Dreaming: Little House in the Big Woods

Sometimes I ask myself, "Do I spend too much time thrifting?" But if I hadn't gone to Housing Works on a particular day for a browse, I would have never scored all of these Little House books for just 50 cents! I'm missing just two: By the Shores of Silver Lake and These Happy Golden Years. I've been really eager to read the books since Wendy McClure's charming The Wilder Life book.

"How can we feel so much nostalgia for times in which we never lived or places we can never visit?" Natalie Merchant pondered in the introduction of her folk album, The House Carpenter's Daughter. She said the folks songs on her album "remind us of our humanity, of what we share."

I think of Natalie's words as I just finished reading the first of the series, Little House in the Big Woods, and about my visits with the Bergen County Historical Society (BCHS). Biscuits in the window of the Dutch Out Kitchen at a BCHS event.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote Little House in the Big Woods in 1932, a lean year for our nation economically. Flash forward, and we're in lean years now. Doesn't the humanity share in us a pull toward the most fundamental things: family, home, safety, love of friends, family and companion animals, seasonal delights, good food. Laura delighted in pancakes on a cold winter's morning in her childhood in the 1800s. Who doesn't delight in those now? She loved a good story to escape boredom and inspire and thrill. Me too.

You have to read the books with a grain of salt and understand the context of the times. As a vegetarian, the deer hunt, bear kill, and pig slaughter didn't leave me feeling "snug" and "cozy," although, yes, I suspect I wouldn't have been a vegetarian then. After that uncomfortable hog squealing when it was being killed, "Butchering time was great fun!" I kept thinking, "When do we get to the jam making?" Then there was the scene when Pa blew up a pig's intestine like a balloon and Mary and Laura play with it. Seriously! Although at least people were far more connected to the animals they ate instead of the sanitized meat in the grocery stores now. I don't know if most people would consume so much of it if they really considered how it was raised.

I loved the final chapter when Pa observing the beauty of the bear and deer in the woods was unable to kill them. Of the bear,

"He was a perfect mark to shoot at, but I was much interested in watching him, and the woods were so peaceful in the moonlight, that I forgot all about my gun."

Of the deer, again,

"It was a perfect shot. But he was so beautiful, he looked so strong and free and wild, that I couldn't kill him." He observed a doe and her yearling fawn,

"They stood together, looking at the woods and the moonlight. Their large eyes were soft and shining. I just sat there looking at them, until they climbed away among the shadows. Then I climbed down out of the tree and came home."

Laura said, "I'm glad you didn't shoot them" while Mary declared "We can eat bread and butter." Score one for the wildlife, at least for one chapter!

The books are viewed through a child's eye, and what a world it is.

"Laura loved to look at the lamp, with its glass chimney so clean and sparkling, its yellow flame burning so steadily, and its bowl of clear kerosene colored red by the bits of flannel. She loved to look into the fireplace, flickering and changing all the time, burning yellow and red and sometimes green above the logs, and hovering blue over the golden and ruby coals.

Photo, left of Mary, a re-enactor, at the BCHS Candlemas celebration. See my, "Cause for Cheer, Midwinter is Here" post for more photos.

In the chapter, "The Dance at Grandpa's,"

"They put on their beautiful dresses. Aunt Docia's dress was a sprigged print, dark blue, with sprigs of red flowers and green leaves thick upon it. The basque was buttoned down the front with black buttons which looks so exactly like juicy big blackberries that Laura wanted to taste them.

Aunt Ruby's was wine-colored calico, covered all over with a feathery pattern in a lighter wine colored. It buttoned with gold-colored buttons, and every button had a little castle and a tree carved on it."

To see a modern re-enactment of calico dresses and a dance, see "It Happened at the Calico Frolic."

"Now came the best part of the churning. Ma molded the butter. On the loose bottom of the wooden butter-mold was carved the picture of a strawberry with two strawberry leaves."

"In the winter the cream was not yellow as it was in the summer, and butter churned from it was white and not so pretty. Ma liked everything on her table to be pretty, so in the wintertime she colored the butter."

I thought of the butter at the BCHS Pinkster Fest with the pineapple mold. Food was so precious to the pioneers who worked so hard for it, and I love that they made it beautiful.

I also thought of a passage in the short story "Mother's Love" from my friend Jennifer's (J.J. Brown's) new short story collection, Death and the Dream:

"Mother took the pie out of the oven and it hissed fragrant apple, maple, cinnamon steam through the knife cuts in the top crust. She was making her world beautiful. She was making her world delicious. It could be done, and if anyone could do it, she could."

Life is full of drudgery, whether it was for Ma doing household chores to our modern life for many of us in cubicles. Why not make it as beautiful and delicious as possible?

Laura loved winter, as do I. In "Winter Days,"

"The snow kept coming till it was drifted and banked against the house. In the mornings the window panes were covered with frost in beautiful pictures of trees and flowers and fairies.

Ma said that Jack Frost came in the night and made the pictures, while everyone was asleep."

She refers to a "snug" and "cozy" feeling that I so love of the season. All was calm, all was bright on a December eve in the Dutch Out Kitchen.

After an adventure in "Going to Town" to Pepin, Pa declared the saying...

" 'Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."

Like Pa, I love an adventure, but love being home. All snug and cozy.

Check out the Little House cookbooks for more pioneer escapism. I did from the library. While My Little House Cookbook is more for the younger set, I thought of how many adults (myself included) rely on store-bought shortcuts for pancakes, strawberry jam, and creamy oatmeal. "For the Ingalls family, no matter where they were, mealtime was always a cause for celebration. The family worked very hard for their food, and at every meal they would come together and give thanks." Mealtime is a cause to celebrate. How many of us, especially women, start obsessing over body issues when thinking about food?

The Little House Cookbook by Barbara M. Walker has some interesting frontier history and recipes. I wish I had some Hasty Pudding, Johnny-Cake or blueberry pudding now.

Barbara Walker says, "Cooking was for Laura Ingalls Wilder a social experience and an apprenticeship. By cooking with her elders she learned something about food, something about human communion. Cooking remains one of the few household activities that adults and children older or younger can share in modern urban life."

Walker observes, "Perhaps her (Laura's) native gift of observation was sharpened when she became the "eye" for her blind sister Mary." I think that's an intriguing thought, for Laura, not "rich" in the way we'd say it, observes so much beauty everywhere in her books, which is I think what draws so many of us, myself included, to them nearly eight decades after she penned them. Do you see the beauty everywhere?

Just like Pa would have played! Arkansas Traveler.

A Walk Down Memory Lane with The Wilder Life

One memory that invokes feelings of nostalgia for me and my older sister is going home after school and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie. We still use the show as a comparison for real life. When I made a squash soup too spicy (it really was!) one Thanksgiving, my sister teased, "It's just like when Nellie made cinnamon chicken for Almanzo and Laura doctored it up to ruin their plans." A bite on a leg? "I hope this isn't like when Ma had to cut off part of her leg when the family was away when she got an infection."

Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life, My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie is the perfect summer read for fans of the books and/or show. I vaguely recall having seen some Little House books at the Scholastic book fairs McClure mentions, but she as a child only knew the books. Reacquainted later in adulthood with them, she details her adventures visiting the Little House sites, exploring the history of the West, and even churning butter while watching a Little House episode where Laura breaks Nellie's music box (a classic!)

As a child, the books inspired dreams of frontier life.

"I wanted to live in one room with my whole family and have a pathetic corncob doll of my own. I wanted to wear a calico sunbonnet—or rather, to not wear a calico sunbonnet, the way Laura did, letting it hang down her back by its ties. I wanted to do chores because of those books. Carry water, churn butter, make headcheese. I wanted dead rabbits brought home for supper. I wanted to go out into the backyard and just, I don’t know, grab stuff off trees, or uproot things from the ground, and bring it all inside in a basket and have my parents say, "My land! What a harvest!""

It's easy to see what McClure loves about the books when she notes passages like this in Little House in the Big Woods.

"She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago."

Laura Ingalls Wilder lived from 1867 to 1957. Imagine the great progress and world events she witnessed: the expansion of the West and building of the railroads, the birth of the automobile and aviation industry, the Depression, two World Wars. The last year of her life, I Love Lucy was on the air. Could pioneers have imagined a little square box entertaining them instead of a fiddle? That one day people could have skipped the arduous wagon journey with a flyover country trip?

Consider what you've witnessed in your own lifetime, and what's to come. Born in 1975, the rise of the internet and the tragedy of 9/11 (and the wars that followed) stand out. If I live to Laura's age, it will be 2065. Imagine what the world will be like then!

Doesn't it seem like many of us so often long to go back while time marches forward?

"While we all certainly appreciate the pioneer ordeals, the covered wagons, and the long winters, somehow Sweet and Simple had become our own dream frontier, our Oregon that we'd like to reach someday, always just beyond the horizon."

There's plenty of things not to romanticize. Of a trip Laura took later in her adulthood,

"I could appreciate the glimpses of a shakier and less romantic time in U.S. history, where people crossed the country in search of better times and didn't always find them. More than once Laura mentions passing wagons coming in the opposite direction from Missouri, carrying people who didn't have any luck there."

How much of it was indeed luck. Who could reckon with Mother Nature? I think of the 10,000 Maniacs song, Gold Rush Brides, when Natalie Merchant sang, "The land was free, yet it cost their lives."

Ms. Merchant reminds us, "I see Indians that crawl through this mural that recalls our history." Being dismayed about how the Ingalls family had a less harmonious relationship with the Native Americans, she writes, with Ma Inglass, "She's racist the way some people's grandmas are racist. which makes it pretty awkward, of course, especially when you love your grandmother." When Laura asked Pa hard questions about the Indians, he would tell her to go to bed.

When visiting a cemetery in Burr Oak, McClure observed,

"I noticed how many of the inscriptions measured lifetimes not just in years but in months and days. All these people and all their days." While romantic a notion, think about how short life spans were, how precious it was, and how early death was a more common part of life.

Some things are worth longing for. Reading an article the same day I finished the book about teens and adults increasingly sending intimate photos of themselves through our "progress" of various devices, suddenly Laura and Almanzo's buggy rides by the lake sounds quite appealing. It made me sad that courtship seems to be dead. Would modern day Laura and Almanzo be unable to sit through a meal without whipping out their devices?

I now want to read the whole Little House series, and admittedly, googled, "Sunbonnets, where to buy." Hey, if adult women can walk around with the word "Juicy" scrawled on their behind, I can wear a sunbonnet! I haven't bought one - yet!

Check out McClure's humorous Twitter postings as Laura Ingalls Wilder, and her photo stream of Flickr. Learn more about the Little House books.