Re-discovery

Yesterday, while I was home, sick, from work, I purchased on my Kindle and read The Wilder Life, by Wendy McClure. I enjoyed it. She recollects in her adulthood her love for the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and over the course of a year visits most of the sites and museums related to the series, and the journeys have a meaning for her that she finally discovers.

Like her, I did love those books as a girl. She had a paperback set, but I think she's a little younger than I am and that those were not out in my day. What I would do was repeatedly check them out of the library. I would find a pile of new books to read, then go get one of the Little House books and get it, too. Like Wendy McClure, I fantasized about the pioneer life without in any way emulating the actual hard work in real life--unable to complete embroidery and knitting projects.

I can even remember when I first heard of the Laura books. When I was in third grade, my family moved from Key West, Florida, to Austin, Texas, due to my father's military career. At the new school two events brought the books to my attention. One was that the teacher was reading aloud to the class On the Banks of Plum Creek, and the first chapter I heard was the one where mean girl Nellie Olsen gets her comeuppance when she wades in Plum Creek and gets leeches in her legs, which sends her into fits. My new classmates roared with laughter. And when we went to the school library, we all sat at tables and our teacher said that the quietest table could go first to pick out their books. Everyone immediately became still and proper, with their hands folded in front of them. She chose a different table than mine, and the little girl next to me expressed dismay that those lucky chosen ones would get all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.

I enjoyed reading Ms. McClure's re-discovery of these books, her humorous stories about going to the locations, her relating of the quest to her own life, and overall I found the book satisfying. She had a very good-natured boyfriend/significant other who not only went with her to several locations but also read the books so he would understand what they were seeing. If you're someone who idolizes the books or the show, you might not enjoy her humor, but if you can reconcile your love for Laura's simple, hard-working life on the prairie with a more urban, modern narrator you might enjoy it.

Here's an example. McClure writes about a book of letters from later in Laura's life that she read that disappointed her when she was a girl because they weren't like the novels:

West from Home was a collection of Laura’s letters home from her trip in San Francisco in 1915 to visit Rose, now an adult, and to see the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Had I first read them when I was older, I probably could have connected the dots between the Laura of the Little House books, with her braids blowing in the wind, and the older woman who traveled across the country, writing about weather and hotel rooms. As an eight-year-old kid, though, I couldn’t make sense of any of it. ... What was this Panama-Pacific thing? Where was Laura? I’d finally figured out that she went by the adult nicknames “Bessie” and “Mama Bess,” and at last I managed to glean two bits of information about her. One: that she was “growing fat,” or so her daughter, Rose, said, in a letter home to Almanzo. According to Rose, Laura ate multiple buttered scones “without a quiver!” At the time I read that I was growing up in a household full of diet books, so I was mortified. Two: Rose reported, in the very next letter, that Laura had fallen off a streetcar and hit her head. I couldn’t un-know these sad facts, that the little Half-Pint I knew and loved had become some kind of embarrassing middle-aged person who got into stupid mishaps in the big city. In my mind, the world of the Little House books just went up in smoke at the end, their heroine disappearing into clumsy ordinariness and ignominy. It had always trailed off with a vague, unspoken disappointment. It’s the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it’s all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress—it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!

If that offends you, you won't enjoy the book, but if it made you laugh,  you will.