A Plug for the "Little House" Books

The weather and the view here, these past few days, has been so bright and so beautiful that I'm feeling a bit sheepish for complaining about snow in my last blog.

Fall has not let us down this year. Last week's unwelcome snow melted quickly, and the warm breeze and vivid blue sky of these past few days has more than made up for it. It's truly been hard to spend time indoors.

Part of it is that we're still new enough to our surroundings here in Colfax that we can't seem to drive down the road without marveling "We live here! Yea!" The rolling hills and farmland, the trees and wildlife... SO much nicer than the scenery of our old neighborhood (no offense, Eau Claire).

And actually, truth be told, even during last week's so-called "bad" weather (when we got three inches of snow), there was nothing to complain about. I spent my days indoors all comfy and cozy, with Leila and a good book.

I've been re-reading the "Little House" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Before you scoff at me for reading children's books, let me encourage you to give these particular books another chance. An adult reader will have a greater appreciation for the things she's writing about.

She gives careful descriptions of how ordinary families got through their daily lives on the American frontier. Hint: it involved lots of hard work and specialized knowledge, passed down to children by their parents. People had to do almost everything for themselves. Nothing was readily available and nothing could be taken for granted.

Even simple meals were accomplishments-- collaborations, really, between family members who worked on the different aspects of each meal. If meat was served, someone hunted or raised the animal that provided the meat. Someone in the family butchered the animal, and others took care to save and preserve the non-food parts of the animal for their practical uses later... be it leather or the fat used to make lard, soap, or candle wax.

In other words, eating was the exact opposite of "fast food".


Now. I don't mean to idealize that point of history. There was certainly plenty wrong with it. I wouldn't want to live back then.

But people had an appreciation for things that we seem to lack today. They appreciated what they had because they knew what it was like to go without.

A bad economy and the reversals of fortune that many of us have experienced in recent years reminds us what deprivation is. That's a hard lesson to learn but it's not entirely a bad thing. Not if the result is that we become more appreciative of what we have, more careful with our resources, and more compassionate toward the people who truly go without... here and around the world.

That's what I've been thinking about lately, anyway. And the insight is partly due to reading all those Little House on the Prairie books.

For instance. As it snowed here and as Leila napped, I read Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "The Long Winter." In it Laura recounts how her family lived through one unusually long, hard winter in Dakota territory.

A series of blizzards, cold weather, and heavy snow blocked the incoming trains. Supplies they would normally have access to stopped coming altogether... for seven months. In that time, Laura's family ran out of meat, kerosene, and coal.

They lived in virtual darkness. But they plugged away at survival, and kept their kindness and their humor. In the last few months all they had to eat was wheat. They took turns cranking the wheat in a coffee grinder, to make flour so Ma could bake brown bread for their next meal.

Since there was no coal or wood left, Pa and Laura spent hours every day twisting hay into bundles. Their cold, chafed hands worked quickly to twist enough hay to keep up with the fire.

It was so cold they must never let the fire go out.

How can you read that story and not feel really, really lucky that you have a soft chair and a fuzzy blanket to retreat to?

I rest my case.