#little house in the big woods
I’m not supposed to love her, but her books are my jewel box.
Like many other little girls, I discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder in the library. My school librarian, however, refused to let me check out Little House in the Big Woods, saying I’d be missing out on too many other books more appropriate for my age. My mother gave her a talking to; I devoured the series. My favorite was Farmer Boy, with its extensive descriptions of food so delicious I could eat them off the page, but I also loved Pa’s beard and the tunes from his violin, Laura’s rag doll Charlotte, the blackberry buttons on Ma’s fancy dress, the China Shepherdess, the Whatnot (whatever that was), the sleighs and horses. And I loved the endless descriptions of bed-making and floor-sweeping and butter-churning and well-digging and cabin-building and haystick-twisting. I even loved the coffee grinder used to grind wheat in The Long Winter, and the Pa’s meticulous and endless bullet-making. These were magical objects (looked at longingly, lovingly described) and magical actions, even if I didn’t yet understand what sort of magic they generated.
Once I grew up and became a writer, though, there were so many reasons not to love her: her books had no plot; her Native Americans were stereotypes; her Ma passed along only traditional women’s roles and her Pa used corporal punishment, even if reluctantly; the books were “just” for kids; pioneers destroyed the Western ecosystem; and Laura barely wrote the books herself since they owed so much to her daughter’s editing.
As a serious fiction writer, it was hard to even entertain the possibility that she’d influenced me, but when my daughter was four, I began to read the Little House books aloud to her, and in On the Shores of Silver Lake, I found this passage:
The horse and the man moved together as if they were one animal.
They were beside the wagon only a moment. Then away they went in the smoothest, prettiest run, down into a little hollow and up and away, straight into the blazing round sun on the far edge of the west. The flaming red shirt and the white horse vanished in the blazing golden light.
Laura let out her breath. ‘Oh, Mary! The snow-white horse and the tall, brown man, with such a black head and a bright red shirt! The brown prairie all around—and they rode right into the sun as it was going down. They’ll go on in the sun around the world.’
Mary thought a moment. Then she said, ‘Laura, you know he couldn’t ride into the sun. He’s just riding along on the ground like anybody.’
But Laura did not feel that she had told a lie. What she had said was true too. Somehow that moment when the beautiful, free pony and the wild man rode into the sun would last forever. (Wilder, On the Shores of Silver Lake, p.65)
In it, I greeted myself, not in the character Laura, or the girl Laura Ingalls, or the farm woman and writer Laura Ingalls Wilder with her raising of chickens and her pithy aphorisms and the libertarian politics she probably picked up from her daughter, but as the writer of these particular books, with their focus on object and landscape, their metaphoric and meteoric descriptions, their destitution of traditional plot, their striving for the perfect word and their stretching of language until it becomes a transportive medium all channeled through the character Laura as she voices what she sees, eyes for her blind sister Mary. Losing myself in the magical objects and actions of her books was really losing myself in language, in a process of reading and writing that transported—and still transports—me into another world, a mysterious and thrilling world, tangent to the one I live in.
I knew I would never really play with Charlotte, ride a black pony bareback across the prairie, revel in harvesting hay, or live happily in a homestead shack. It was not the objects or actions themselves that I loved but the reading of them and the writing of them. Their unblinking focus, their yearly swirl through the cycle of seasons, is like looking down a telescope or up from the bottom of a well, like the moment you find yourself face-to-face with the one you love the most and the rest of the world slips away.
During this pure attention, the loved object sucks up the entire world and radiates it back to you, creating a jitteriness that comes from knowing that reading the next word will continue to create the loved one and also start the process of killing the loved one, moving past this most loved image to the next, leaving the loved one in the past.
The objects in books—the objects of books—are so slippery. I do not know if reading and rereading these books as a child formed the sort of writer I’ve become or if they appealed to me because, already at age 7, I was that sort of writer, but each book is a box and each word a jewel.
Maya Sonenberg’s story collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize) and Voices from the Blue Hotel (Chiasmus Press, 2006). More recent fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Web Conjunctions, Hotel Amerika, Fairy Tale Review, New Ohio Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington, Seattle.
