bluecastle | 28 Books -- Day 2

"Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the big woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs." (and so The Little House in the Big Woods begins)

There is probably no book that had more impact on me as a child than the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder... (herein is where I begin to cheat on the definition of "book" ... just join me in thinking of them as a 9 volume novel) ...and I've got the yellow dotted-swiss sunbonnet to prove it.

On this day when groundhogs are all the rage here in Pennsylvania, it seems appropriate to talk about stories of wide open plains where inquisitive prairie dogs poke their heads up to watch the clouds slide across to the horizon.

I have a memory of long bright library shelving units wherein I first met Laura and Mary and baby Carrie ...

I know I received the complete box set as a Christmas present. I still have them, worn as they are after many re-readings. They sit with pride of place on the very top of my vast bookshelves. The complete set, along with accumulated biographies, cookbooks, and the later "and now for the rest of the story" volumes by Rose Wilder Lane. Topped of course by my own version of the little china lady that always sat someplace prominent in the various Ingalls' homes.

This one, the final home [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RockyRidgeFarm.jpg] , I have actually stood in.

One summer my Dad packed us into his big brown station wagon for a trip west to see his relatives in Iowa. On the way back home, we swung south so I could visit Rocky Ridge in Mansfield, Missouri. I remember it so clearly, in a way I often don't remember places visited on other trips I was taken on as a child. Perhaps because it was someplace I had asked to go (Did I ask?? I must have, but I don't recall). Perhaps it was that I somehow felt I recognized it from the books, despite that homestead not figuring prominently until just at the very end.

I am never sure about my memories, whether they are true memories, or whether they have been constructed from other stories, from other pictures, from sources other than my own. Most of the time I do not often actually live in the here and now, but rather exist just south of now, in the elsewhere...

I tend to get lost in stories. Probably why I prefer series' rather than single volumes. I almost always prefer to think there is more to the story. And so it was a delight to follow this little pioneer girl from the woods of Wisconsin, across the plains and prairies, through Indian Country, whether she was sitting on a hay tick in the back of a covered wagon, walking to school along dusty roads, being courted in a sleigh jingling with bells, or being driven by her bridegroom in a buggy with isinglass curtains.

And through the words on the page, I could come along for the ride. How wonderful is that???

And Laura's engagement ring is the reason I've always worn a garnet ring on my left hand. Even when it wasn't a garnet, but simply some red glass in a ring from a stall at the county fair which turned my finger green. I think if I ever find a ring with a garnet between two pearls, I will be delirious with joy.

Most of the heroines I read about in books when I was young weren't American. But this series is about as quintessentially American as it gets. And I just love that.

The series includes:

Little House in the Big Woods (1932)

Farmer Boy (1933)
Little House on the Prairie (1935)
On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937)
By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939)
The Long Winter (1940)
Little Town on the Prairie (1941)
These Happy Golden Years (1943)
The First Four Years (1971)

On the Way Home (1962)
West From Home (1974)