Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House On The Prairie

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I grew up in a little house in the big woods. A log cabin, one room, with a cozy cellar and an attic filled with herbs, garden vegetables, and jams. I ran along the banks of Plum Creek. Bonnet untied, chasing the babbling brook, grasshoppers caught in my small palms. I fell in love out west, in a little town on the prairie. A carriage, sleek and majestic, with two passengers, drawn by gorgeous chestnut horses. At least, I thought I did, as a child. From the age of five, I tucked myself into the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the autobiographical Little House on the Prairie series. These novels were my close companions, and inspired both school projects and road trips. Laura’s homes form a scatter plot across the Midwest and Great Plains, log skeletons being held together today by women who love Laura’s life as much as I do. These homes, and the history inside of them, embedded two desires within me that I have carried with me since opening up the Little House pages the first time: want for the simple and want for the …show more content…

They took risks, abandoning all they knew, all they found comfortable to forge ahead into the United States territories long before they became states. In order to abandon what they knew and seek out new adventures, Laura’s family had to create the comfortable. The first book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods, tells of their home in Pepin, Wisconsin; a comfortable house in the green forests of the Great Lakes region, tiny, filled with baked bread, cured meats, patched socks, and paper dolls. This picturesque image, of the house built by Laura’s Pa’s two hands, just miles away from his mother’s home, cultivated over the years, was the comfort required before the adventure began, before years out on the prairie, chasing the horizon, moving from territory to

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