The Wilder Life Read online

  I know in these columns she spoke on behalf of farm wives, who were shrewd businesswomen and equal partners with their husbands, and I appreciate that she was opinionated, but my eyes get heavy every time I read more than a couple starchy paragraphs about the values of hard work and neighborliness and moderation and so on. The Laura who wrote these things isn’t quite the Laura I know, more like a know-it-all aunt droning on and on: “It may well be that it is not our work that is so hard for us as the dread of it and our often expressed hatred of it,” she says in a 1920 column. “Perhaps it is our spirit and attitude toward life, and its conditions that are giving us trouble instead of a shortage of time.” I suppose she’s got a point there, but zzzz.

  And yet even in this non–Little House era of Laura’s writing career there are things that I love about her. One of my favorite articles is a magazine piece, written with Rose’s help, called “My Ozark Farm Kitchen,” in which she describes (and shows in photographs), the ingenious cabinetry and shelves Almanzo had custom-built for the Mansfield farmhouse; she made it sound as wondrous as anything Pa had ever put together, only with a distinctly grown-up sense of delight that for me is every bit as satisfying as flipping through the Container Store catalog. I am also fond of a Ruralist column called “The Home Beauty Parlor,” which includes advice like “Washing in buttermilk will whiten the hands and face. Fresh strawberries rubbed on the skin will bleach it, and rhubarb and tomatoes will remove stains from the fingers,” all of which makes Laura’s Ozark farm kitchen sound like some kind of wonderful organic-chic retro day spa.

  Never mind those old chestnuts about self-reliance in the Ruralist columns; if Laura launched a home décor/lifestyle magazine called Simple Things I would totally subscribe to it. But I’d settle for visiting the house in Mansfield.

  It was impossible to miss the farmhouse from the road. It was perched high on a green hill surrounded by giant old trees, a simple but stately white clapboard house with two porches and a stone chimney. I’d expected the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum to be a sleepy kind of place, as tranquil as the house always appeared in pictures, but as I drove up I saw modern buildings alongside the house and realized it was a fairly bustling complex with the museum, the educational center, a gift shop, and a parking lot across the highway.

  It was a tight operation. When I went into the museum and paid my admission, the woman at the front desk launched into a memorized spiel: the house tour was forty-five minutes long; visitors must wait for the tour time on their tickets; visitors weren’t allowed to take photos in the museum or the farmhouse, only outdoors; visitors could browse in the museum until their tour began. “Uh, can I come back into the museum after the tour?” I asked the woman, a sharp-eyed woman with salt-and-pepper hair. Her name tag said PAM.

  “Oh, you’ll have to,” she replied. “There’s so much you’ll really need to come back to see it all,” she said, as if I had no choice.

  But Pam was right: I only had to glance at the huge room and the rows of glass cases to see that there was more Laura stuff under this roof than anywhere else in the world. The other homesites might have a few of the Ingalls family quilts or a couple of Laura’s china place settings, but clearly this was the mother lode, a lifetime’s worth of possessions. It was almost too much to take in at once—all the cases of yellowing handkerchiefs, gloves, letters with faded handwriting, bits of needlework, everything labeled with little typed cards. So much of it was unremarkable at first glance but utterly precious once you looked closely. Here were Laura and Mary’s school slates and the china jewel box that Laura had received for Christmas in On the Banks of Plum Creek! So many of the photos I’d seen over the years were here, too, in their original form: Ma and Pa’s wedding tintype, the Ingalls family portrait that the woman at the Little House on the Prairie site in Kansas couldn’t bear to look at. Mary’s artifacts were particularly poignant: one case held the beadwork trinkets Mary had made at the Iowa College for the Blind, her Braille books, the letters she’d written on the special slate that kept her handwriting straight.

  Certain pieces were iconic; Pa’s fiddle was in a display case all its own, its tuning screws ancient. Every so often it was carefully taken out and played at festivals by professional musicians. The bread plate from The First Four Years was heavy and chipped. The infamous lap desk where the hundred-dollar bill had been misplaced was in its own case, too; lest anyone forget the lap desk’s significance, a fake bill was sticking out from under its lid.

  There was a white lawn dress that Laura had made and worn in one of my favorite photos, one where she’s standing at the edge of a spring at Rocky Ridge Farm. It was taken at a distance and the dress made her a pale figure in the deep shade of the trees. Now it hung on a dress form in a glass case, small but life-sized. I stared down at its shoulders and its high pretty neckline trying to sense what Laura’s physical presence would have been like. The figure I imagined had enough substance to be a real person but was still somehow slight, ghostly and remote enough to live in the world of a story.

  When it was time for the house tour, about a dozen of us gathered at the museum door. The woman waiting in front of me seemed vaguely familiar; from the way she kept glancing back, she seemed to think that about me, too.

  “Didn’t we see you yesterday?” she asked me finally. “At the Little House on the Prairie?” I suddenly remembered the family of seven who’d driven up in the minivan; I’d seen them filing out of the cabin in Kansas. They were following the same course I was. As soon as we made the connection, she turned and announced it to her family. “Guess what, this lady is seeing all the Laura things, too!”

  Her name was Karen, her husband was Keith. Their children ranged in ages from about five to preteen: two boys, three girls, including seven-year-old blond twins. The family hailed from Houston. Here, as in Kansas, they seemed to give off the sort of exuberant team spirit that would no doubt make them an excellent casting choice for one of the friendlier reality shows; they’d be the folks you’d root for.

  I also struck up a conversation with a woman named Catherine Pond, who was especially excited to see the kitchen. It turned out she was a writer and architectural historian who had written a book about the history of pantries in American houses. When she mentioned this, it launched us both into an excited recollection of the various pantries in the Little House books. Catherine’s favorite was the one described at the end of These Happy Golden Years, in the house Almanzo built.

  “With all the little drawers for the sugar and the flour?” Catherine said. “I loved that!”

  “Yes! And remember the one in the surveyors’ house?” That was from By the Shores of Silver Lake, when the Ingalls family spends the winter in a well-stocked house owned by the railroad company; I lived for the description of the neat shelves full of abundance.

  “You have to read this article Laura wrote about the kitchen in the house here,” Catherine told me.

  “Oh my God! ‘My Ozark Farm Kitchen’? I loved that!” I was practically squealing like a fan girl. I was beginning to feel at home here.

  We were all led into the educational center to watch a short introductory video, a brief history of the Ingalls and the Almanzo Wilder families. You could hear audio of Pa’s fiddle being played and even of Laura herself speaking in a rare interview. Although her elderly voice was unlovely—sort of flat and jowly—I loved hearing it and delighted in discovering, when she mentioned Mary’s education, that she pronounced “Iowa” with a long a, as in “Ioway College of the Blind in Vinton, Ioway.”

  Then we went on into the house, led by an older lady with a pulchritudinous Ozark accent. (She referred to the home’s residents as “Lawra” and “Almayanzo.”) Although the kitchen didn’t have a pantry, it was every bit as retro fabulous as I’d hoped: we all admired the gleaming enamel cookstove, the patterned wallpaper, the cheery yellow-painted cabinetry. My new friend Catherine approved. Even the “modern” refrigerator, installed in the 1950s, was now
charmingly vintage. The counters and cabinets and even the ceiling were low, since Almanzo had built the whole house to fit Laura and himself, both short-statured. My friend Justin had visited the house on a field trip when he was a kid and had warned me that the place would look like “a freakin’ fun house,” but it was really enchanting. Everyone in our group seemed to agree, including a retired contractor. “A place will still sell if you customize it,” he said, as if he were giving Laura and Almanzo free advice on their remodeling decisions.

  The guide pointed out a calendar that hung by the kitchen window. It was open to February 1957. “That calendar was hanging there the day Laura died,” she said, and a hush came over our group. Laura had passed away just a few days after her ninetieth birthday. To emphasize this point, the table in the dining room displayed a carefully strewn arrangement of birthday cards from schoolchildren, as if to show when time stopped for Laura, and moreover that it stopped contentedly.

  We learned that the Wilders enjoyed their radio but never owned a TV. In the bedroom a 1956 Montgomery Ward catalog rested on a side table. It was a long, narrow room with two twin beds that faced each other, foot to foot, which seemed unromantic until the tour guide mentioned that Laura slept in Almanzo’s bed after his death in order to feel closer to him, and then it seemed breathtakingly sweet and sad.

  Everything about the house tour, in fact, felt like an homage to the bittersweetness of old age or the vanished past. In between the tour guide’s segments we all had begun to talk to one another in the group, we adults at least, talking about anything we might have remembered and that connected us to a place like this.

  “I just keep thinking about how much changes in a lifetime,” said the wife of the retired contractor. “We didn’t have TV yet when I was little and I remember thinking that was a big deal, but I mean Laura, she saw the railroads get built,” she marveled.

  Keith said that the house reminded him of his grandparents. “My grandma would never throw anything away,” he said. “Breakfast was whatever was left over, and they were happy to have it.”

  “I really want to find kitchen canisters like the ones Laura had!” I said to Catherine the Pantry Lady. I couldn’t say anything more profound than that, though of course I’d been moved by everything I’d seen so far. The house seemed to embody everything I loved about the Little House books—the kitchen built for dozens of daily rituals, the big windows that let you see the landscape (Laura hadn’t had them curtained). I couldn’t get enough.

  Even the linoleum, original to the house, seemed like a tribute to the past. “We get forty thousand visitors walking through here every season, and look how it’s held up,” the guide said. “They just don’t make this stuff like they used to.”

  The museum seemed to have a tractor beam like the Death Star: it sucked us back in after the tour. None of us could resist the big magical building full of old-timey things. There were buttons Laura had collected; the notebook with the draft of By the Shores of Silver Lake; the engraved name cards that had been so fashionable in De Smet in Little Town on the Prairie.

  “Are you going over to see the other house?” the retired contractor asked me as I studied a display of Little House books that had been published in Slovenian.

  “It’s part of the tour, but we don’t know what’s there, do you? Was that where Rose lived?” his wife asked.

  Between the rapturous nostalgia of the farmhouse and the tractor-beam effect of the museum, I had all but forgotten there was another house here—a small newer one that Rose had had built in 1928. It was an English cottage-style house built with Sears Roebuck plans and called the Rock House. It was on the farm property but farther down the road, out of sight of the rest of the museum complex. Now I recalled hearing that we could drive or walk over to see it.

  “No, I think Rose had built it for her parents as a little retirement house or something,” I told Mr. and Mrs. Contractor. I’d remembered this from the biographies. “But I don’t know what’s there.”

  At the moment all I could do was take in as much as I could here in the museum. While I’d loved seeing the site in Kansas the day before, there hadn’t been much to see besides the land and the well and the cabin; here, though, I could gorge myself on artifacts. Like Laura’s gun. Laura’s gun! The card next to it in the case said that she carried a revolver during the journey from South Dakota to Missouri and often used it to shoot “small game.” I liked how spunky that made her seem, though I was wondering if perhaps younger children would be troubled by the notion of Half-Pint taking out bunny rabbits and birdies like Dirty Harry. I was still contemplating this when Karen came down the aisle with her twin daughters.

  “We’re looking for Charlotte,” she said. “Do you know if it’s anywhere?” She meant Laura’s rag doll that she’d gotten for Christmas in Little House in the Big Woods. I told her I didn’t think so; the doll would be one of the most sacred Little House relics if it still existed, and I would’ve seen pictures of it in the biographies.

  “I guess you’re right,” she said. We started sharing our personal histories with the Little House books. She told me she hadn’t read the series as a child, but there was a homeschooling curriculum based on them, and now the younger kids were studying under it.

  “They play Little House all the time,” she said, gesturing over at the girls. “I think they really love the family, how sweet they all were, how simple it all was. And, you know, we just love the faith that was running throughout.”

  Keith nodded. I noticed just then he was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of a Christian college. “They’re just great books,” he said.

  Both Karen and Keith were so nice to talk to I hoped they wouldn’t pick up on the fact that I wasn’t quite the same kind of Little House fan that they were. I know there are a lot of folks who can easily see Christian messages in the books, lessons about trusting and accepting the will of God in times of hardship and relying on the bedrock of one’s faith to get through. There’s plenty of stuff in the books that can help illustrate these things, I guess. But the Ingalls family in the books didn’t appear to be much the praying types, unless the occasional hymn on Pa’s fiddle counts. Mary becomes a little godly by the later books, but as for the rest of the family, their reasons for attending church seemed to have more to do with partaking in civilized town life than with religious devotion. I suppose I’m inclined to see it that way because that’s how my family did things—went to church (Congregational) sporadically and understatedly. Whenever Ma Ingalls brought out the Bible, it seemed to me to be pretty interchangeable with the other books they turned to for comfort, like the novel Millbank and Pa’s Wonders of the Animal World, only slightly more important.

  But in the case of families like Keith and Karen’s, their Laura World includes certain aspects that mine does not; in their Little House scenes the Bible is likely always close by and the Lord near at hand watching over the family through the droughts and blizzards.

  I don’t mind that it’s this way for other people, especially if it makes the books more meaningful to them. And yet there’s a moment in the 2005 movie version of Little House on the Prairie when, after the Ingalls family has found the spot where they would build the log cabin, they all stand in a circle and clasp hands. Pa leads them all in a prayer to thank God and bless the land. Perhaps it was added to appeal to the Karens and Keiths in the Disney demographic. But for me it changed everything about who the Ingallses were supposed to be, even though the real family was long lost under that book’s myriad and slippery fictional layers. Suddenly it wasn’t enough that they were good people, they had to be the right kind of good. I guess I found it presumptuous, but it was deeper than that: what made me uncomfortable was the idea of the prayer as an embellishment, a pious flourish.

  Anyway, these were the kind of sooty agnostic thoughts that I didn’t want Keith and Karen to know I had, because it would have made things awkward. Of course, it wasn’t their fault that a brief moment in a TV movie
creeped me out. And like I said, they were swell people. Karen even had the kids tell me what they liked most about the books.

  Abigail: “They were always happy.”

  Anna: “I like Laura and Mary.”

  Olivia: “They were always together. And Almanzo was a very nice man.”

  Jacob: “I liked the one about the farmer boy.”

  “They were all just so content,” Karen added. “So content. Even in the hard times. And the way Laura portrayed it was all so simple. So . . . simple.” She laughed. “I guess I said that before. But it’s true. It’s a beautiful portrait of a life of contentment and peace and trust.”

  Sometimes when I hear folks maunder on about how simple Laura’s lifestyle was I wonder if they’ve ever thought about all the hauling and fetching and stowing and stoking it took just to boil a pot of water. But seeing Karen and Keith and Abigail and Anna and Olivia and Jacob and the older kid whose name I didn’t catch, I could understand. Surely they were up to all that cheerful hauling and fetching, and wouldn’t it be nice to have just a stove fire to think about rather than carpooling to soccer practice? Never mind, then.

  Karen went on. “And we love Mary, too. She was so content, you know, and she never complained.”

  One of the twins, Anna, I think, nodded solemnly at this.

  If their photos are any indication, Laura and Almanzo were the cutest old couple ever. They stood side by side in their photos, their poses stiff but matching, and together they smiled faint, gentle smiles that seemed to tell the camera, in the nicest way possible, that they’d rather be alone.

  I was nearly at the far end of the museum by now, where the items in the glass cases were getting a little random. They had Laura’s glasses on display, her jewelry, her wallet. It turns out she was one of those people who actually fills out the little I.D. card that comes with the wallet, but maybe everyone did in those days. Apparently Almanzo never threw out any of his license plates.