LHOTR - Sunday studies

 

Don’t mind me, I’m up to page 321.

Even gals in the 1860s knew you have to take care of your hair, amiright Martha and Docia?

Simple pleasures: books and deep conditioning treatments.

I am unsure how to label my lifelong enthusiasm for the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Am I an obsessive fan, a fastidious student, or merely an exhaustive collector of information on my 19th century spirit animal?

My consumption of Little House books went beyond the original eight as early as nine years old, when the one thing I wanted for Christmas more than anything was the hardcover edition of The First Four Years, the first “extra” in the series. And my curiosity was piqued by the pulp paperback Laura, which was passed around by all the girls in my class, where I first discovered the news of baby brother Freddie. From the first time I borrowed On the Banks of Plum Creek from the Jackson District Library on Orange Street back in 1978 to this Christmas, scholars and Laura’s estate have guaranteed there was always MORE. 

This Christmas’ indulgence at my own little house has been inhaling the book Prairie Fires, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning book by Caroline Fraser. I somehow missed its publication three years ago as I had embarked on the chore of reading the original text of Pioneer Girl, which was presented alongside Pamela Smith Hill’s own research. Sidenote: I also took not one but two online literature classes from Missouri State University on the subject of Laura, taught by Smith-Hill. 

Anyway, at this writing I’m currently on page 321, where extracting Little House in the Big Woods from the original manuscript from Pioneer Girl is happening. The research is thorough and there’s thought provoking theories as to why Laura wrote her family history that goes beyond the need for money during the Great Depression. Laura began to collect stories about the Big Woods from her Aunt Martha shortly after Ma died, and was urged to put pencil to composition book after her sister Mary passed. 

I’m learning more than I expected, stopping numerous times during the first 100 pages to research serfdom, the outlawing of peonage in 1867, Russian winter wheat’s impact on the global economy in the 1870s, arid weather reports of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain locusts, the impact of the Civil War draft on a young Wisconsin, tableland, sod houses, dugouts, and the railroad’s western expansion at the beginning of the industrial revolution. 

And I deep conditioned my hair. A girl needs to look good, be it a sugaring off dance or a retreat to the river during a pandemic.