All I Need to Know I Learned from...

Laura Ingalls Wilder:

My dad read the Little House on the Prairie series to each of us girls as kids...several times. I picked up many important realities from those books, which, as I was realizing just the other day, have contributed to my personal development considerably. For instance:

I learned that parents can be wrong. I distinctly remember discussing Pa's view of Indians with my own dad when the Ingalls' were somewhere out on the grasslands in a pioneer's hut squatting and carving an existence out of someone else's land.

I realized the real moral significance of that giant pumpkin at the county fair. Ever since young Almanzo spent all summer milk-feeding his prize pumpkin up to monumental proportions back at the family farm in upstate New York, I would view that oversized vegetable - a necessary feature of every American rural county fair worth its salt - with a solemn respect for the patience and know-how of pioneers and country folk.

Old fashioned recipes are good precicely because of their nostalgia. Theoretically, since reading these books, I can cook apples n' onions, make headcheese and soap out of lard, hickory smoke venison, and pull maple sugar snow candy. Though I've only tried a few of the recipes and homemaking practices of the historical storyteller's beloved Ma, (and succeeded at only a select few), when you tell someone that this is an old-fashioned pioneer recipe, (rather than just saying it was something that I improvised from a children's book I read a dozen times) it's automatically incredible.

I carry any number of amazing stories, memories not my own, and knowledge of another time around in my head - prairie fires that moved so fast they didn't burn the grass, cruel blizzards that lasted for days, building of the railroads, sod houses, grasshopper plagues, augue fever, drought, flood, and deprivation that translated into pioneer spirit and a lifetime of imagination and adventure for the Grande girls.

One thing I always wondered about as a little girl as I wandered about with my imaginary friend Laura - if she ever did get to travel forward in time and see my world the way I got to share hers through her books, how would I explain plastic to her?