The store was full of things to look at. All along one side of it were shelves full of colored prints and calicos. There were beautiful pinks and blues and reds and browns and purples. On the floor along the sides of the plank counters there were kegs of nails, and kegs of round, gray shot, and there were big wooden pails full of candy. There were sacks of salt, and sacks of store sugar. In the middle of the store was a plow made of shiny wood, with a glittering bright plowshare, and there were steel ax heads, and hammer heads, and saws, and all kinds of knives—hunting knives and skinning knives and butcher knives and jack-knives. There were big boots and little boots, big shoes and little shoes. Laura could have looked for weeks and not seen all the things that were in that store. She had not known there were so many things in the world.
Little House in the Big Woods
I’ve always loved February best of all the winter months. Likely because of his 28 days clearly marking him as an underdog next to December and January with their show-off 31 days. I’ve always had a thing for underdogs. Considering this, I also love the promise of the infamous February 29 every couple of years. Also in February winter is slowly coming to an end. There are days heavy on sunshine. But also some that call for a long bath or a quiet day in bed with a hot water bottle, reading and drinking steaming cups of tea.
Also in February there usually would be cake. Lots and lots of cake, with each of my parents’ and my stepdad’s birthdays coming up. And another person has her birthday. A person long gone whom I’ve never met in real life but who is dear to my heart nonetheless and has been for most of my life as far as I can remember. I can tell you, it was quite easy to decide which book I would re-read this month.
Happy Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder
On February 7, I celebrated Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 155th birthday with a self-made nut corner and the first fifty or so pages of Little House in the Big Woods. I’ve already read this book about five times, so it might as well be the second-most-read book I own, following my favourite one in the series, The Long Winter, which I used to read once a year.
And yes, in case you were wondering, it all started with the 70s TV show starring Melissa Gilbert and Michael Landon. My Mum used to watch it when she was younger, and I with her as I was growing up. I loved the show with all my heart and even more for the fact that my Mum named me after Laura. A decision, I’ll be eternally thankful for! (Shout out to my Mum. Actually, if it hadn’t been for her there might not be an article.)
Today I know I wasn’t the only Laura named after Laura Ingalls Wilder. In fact, a lot of Little House fans named their girls Laura and Mary. But when I was a kid it felt really special that I was sharing my name with her. Well, I guess, it still feels like that to some extent. A big wish on my bucket list therefore is and has been for a long time a Laura Ingalls Wilder-tour around the United States. To start off in Wisconsin, visit the dug out in Walnut Grove, Charles’ house in De Smet and the Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri where Laura grew old with her husband Almanzo. I’m definitely going to do this in the next couple of years with my cousin. If Covid-19 will let us. And I promise, I’ll keep you guys updated.
Pioneer Life vs. nowadays
What is it that I love about Laura and the Little House books? When I think back I remember that even as a little girl reading those books for the first time I loved the concept of people being happy and thankful for what little they have, even if they are forced to fight for it almost every day of their lives. I know that the books and the TV show are heavily moralized and that the Ingalls’ might not have faced all this hardship without ever breaking down or struggling to trust in God.
But even so, they were living their life having so much less than most people (in the western world) nowadays and still managed to be happier. It is a lesson everybody of us should learn. Still, I catch myself choosing the easy way all the time and living this life with its pleasantries, forgetting their true cost and how many people all over the world have suffered so that I could purchase something I don’t really need. Do I want people to go back to a way of life 155 years ago? No. But I want us to not constantly work against nature. I want us to be less wasteful, to actually be thankful for the things we have and to not forget the people who are suffering everyday to make our way of life possible.
Little House in the Big Woods might not be the best example of the hardship Laura and her family were facing in the 1870s till 1890s. The loss of their harvest time and time again, sickness, Laura’s older sister Mary going blind, her baby brother dying or the endlessly seeming winter in De Smet that almost starved the family to death. But what this first book (side note: historically, Little House on the Prairie should have been the first book, but somehow I still read them in the order they were published with Little House in the Big Woods being the first one) beautifully shows is how happy and content you can be as long as you have a loving family, a snug little house that keeps the cold out and enough food to put on the table.
Funnily, a lot of the book consists of different ways to prepare food – honey, maple syrup, ham and cheese –, but also of the stories Pa is telling after supper at the end of a long day of work or him playing the fiddle. Reading about a world that is entirely different from life in the 21st century has taught me a lot growing up. I must have been eight years old, not much older than Laura who celebrates her sixth birthday in the first book, and I already knew that you need rennet from a calves’ stomach to make cheese, that in order to get maple syrup a maple tree is tapped by drilling holes in their trunks and that a panther’s cry sounds like a woman’s.
Nowadays, the Little House books strike a nerve with me: the wish for a more modest life without having people around me who are constantly complaining (yep, me included). Complaining about too much work, complaining about the weather being too cold or too hot, complaining about Covid-19 taking our freedom away. When most of us are still leading a f****** privileged life. I’ve had this wish for a more modest life even while growing up, so I gave my Mum Laura Ingalls-inspired presents to Christmas, which were mostly something I had stitched together myself. Later on, I decided I wanted to learn sewing properly, which I’m currently working on. I have tried a couple of recipes from my Little House cookbook, started to plant some vegetables on the windowsill and let myself get inspired to work on some DIY projects.
But of course, I will never live my 21st-century life as the Ingalls’ family did 155 years ago. Nor would I want to. I’m not idealizing this life, the hardship, the position of women in this time. But I will continue to read every word Laura Ingalls Wilder has written and that has been written about her. This woman who feels closer to me than many of the “real” people I stumble across in my everyday life. And I will continue to let myself get inspired by her. As a human being on this planet, as a woman, as a writer, a daughter, sister, girlfriend and friend. And I will keep her memory alive as long as I live. Laura Ingalls Wilder – you’re an inspiration. And a dear friend. Happy Birthday. Rest in Peace.
My Laura 