The Wilder Life

When we were little girls, my best friend Ashley and I loved Little House on the Prairie.

My Dad faithfully read me the Little House books before bed. Then, I watched the spin-off TV show. Then, Ashley and I reenacted the scenes.

Ashley was Laura, the spunky and adventurous heroine. I was Mary, the blind one. The post at the end of the stairs was Almanzo, Laura's beau, and the curtains in the living room were cows... which, of course, we dutifully "milked" by grabbing fistfulls of fabric and tugging along (sorry Mom!)

To this day, I dream of riding in a covered wagon. I suppose I want to feel the wind in my bonnet, see endless miles of prairie and sky, hear our household goods clanging around us, and sleep at night cuddled next to my sisters in a makeshift bed.

(Meredith, Jenna... anyone want to cuddle?)

As sentimental, or okay... odd... as this might sound, I'm not the only grown-up girl with lingering Little House dreams. I recently found a kindred spirit in Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life. 

Like myself, Wendy and numerous other girls in our approximate age range, grew up imagining ourselves in "Laura World," as Wendy calls it. 

(Ashley and I called it "Laura and Mary") 

In The Wilder Life, McClure decides to revisit, sort through, dig up, and uncover her childhood love... starting with churning her own butter and making salt pork, and extending to visiting Little House sites across the Mid-West. 

McClure also studies the real Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Ingalls family, teasing out truth from fiction. We all know (but willingly like to forget) that the Little House books were not strict autobiographical accounts... they are stories. 

The real Ingalls family was grittier, poorer and even more transient than their fictional counterparts. The Little House we know and love is co-mingled with rosier dreams, cleaner-cut story lines, and more compelling characters. 

For example, Laura's Little House nemesis Nellie Oleson (rich, snobby, devious blonde) was actually a conglomerate of three little girls who annoyed Laura, the writer, as a little girl -- proof perhaps that the "real Laura" was a little naughtier, a little rougher than "fictional Laura."

I was also amused (and sometimes horrified) to read what McClure discovered about Little House fan culture. Beyond Laura look-alike contests, theatre productions, and Little House pageants, there is a Little House homeschool curriculum, as well as a movement of people who believe Little House will teach them how to survive the End Times. 

At the end of The Wilder Life, McClure gets her own covered wagon experience... sort of... when she and her boyfriend Chris rent a stationary, fiberglass covered wagon at the Beyond Little House campground in DeSmet, South Dakota.

(Um... yes! I want to go there and rent one too!)

However, McClure's resounding conclusion is that you can't recreate your childhood "Laura World."

Like my best friend Ashley and I who voyaged across prairies and played with corn cob dolls in our minds, McClure's "Laura World" was a place inspired by books, but most alive in the imagination.

In Little House, you can follow a little family into a big, interesting world. When we grow up, when we put our imaginations on a dusty back shelf, we lose the doorway and can't find a way back into "Laura World." But I think its still there. The wagon wheels are still rolling, not for us, but for the next generation, for little girls like Claire.

I can't wait to share Little House with Claire. I can't wait to snuggle up at bedtime to read stories about making maple candy in the snow, seeing Indians on the horizon, and bravely surviving plagues of locusts that ruin the wheat crop.

I'm pretty sure I still have a bonnet somewhere to share with Claire too...