Little House, big reach

Dear Annie,

"Mellow" and "oddball" - excellent choice of words when describing Bob Graham's lovely books.  I'm glad April and Esme was a hit.

Bob found a lovely little story in our neighborhood paper the other day, about a kids' writing contest.  The Library of Congress invites students from fourth to tenth grades to write a letter to an author -- not necessarily a live one -- talking about how the author's books "affected them personally."  49,000 kids sent in letters this year, and the winner is from here in Washington DC.  I thought you'd enjoy this story because she wrote her letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Alessandra Selassie is a fifth grader in a DC charter school; she started reading the Little House books as a kindergartener, and has re-read them over the years.  I can't find the full text of her essay, but here are some excerpts:

When I want water, I turn on the tap.  When it’s dark, I turn on the light.  While my life is so different than yours, I was still so touched by your books because they helped me to finally understand the life of someone I love: my father. 

Her father grew up in Eritrea.  "My dad kept on telling me stories about his childhood, but I wouldn't really understand them," Alessandra told the paper.  He grew up without electricity, sometimes without enough to eat.  "When this contest came up, I thought about my dad, and I realized how I have sort of changed over the time that I had read [the series] because I understood them more, and I related to the books."  Wilder, she writes,

gave me a new way of looking at him. ... I know you wrote these books to help children understand the lives of American pioneers, but for me, it helped me see my father's African childhood as being less foreign.

This makes me think of a discussion you and I had back when the blog was young, about books as windows or mirrors.   Author Mitali Perkins spoke at BEA in 2010, saying that some books will reflect readers' own experiences back at them, while others provide a window into unimagined new worlds.  For Alessandra, Wilder provided the window to a mirror reflecting her father back to her.

Love,

Deborah

Alessandra Selassie, holding a mock-up of her $1,000 prize check, with lots of supportive unidentified grown-ups.

Blizzards and budding romance

Dear Aunt Debbie,

The temperatures are climbing in Brooklyn, and this afternoon we set out for our first day of water play in the parks.  At home, however, Eleanor and I find ourselves shivering and worrying about how long food supplies can hold out now that the trains have stopped running.

As you might have guessed, this means that we're deep into book six of the Little House series: The Long Winter.  This makes Little House the first chapter book series that Eleanor has wanted to read straight through, one after the other. Yes, she's also loved the Betsy-Tacy books and The Borrowers, but she's been willing to take breaks between books. Not so with Little House.

The Long Winter may be the most dramatic book of the series.  In it, Ma, Pa, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and Grace (the youngest Ingalls, born between Plum Creek and Silver Lake) are living out in the little town of De Smet, in the Dakota territories.  Pa has a claim a mile or so from town, and the family has been living in a tiny shanty to stave off claim jumpers.  But winter begins early that year, and promises to last for months. The first severe blizzard, in October, convinces the family they need to move to town.  Even in Pa's well-built storefront on Main Street, they are cold and isolated as the blizzards keep coming, sealing them in the house for days at a time.  Then snow stops the trains from running, and soon the Ingalls family is pretty much out of supplies and facing starvation.

The natural drama of the situation is coupled with foreshadowed romantic drama: this is the book where Almanzo Wilder reappears.  (Technically, we get a brief glimpse of him at the end of By the Shores of Silver Lake). Almanzo and his older brother Royal have come out west to stake claims of their own: Almanzo plans to farm, and Royal to be a storekeeper.  While much of the narrative is in close third-person perspective focused on Laura, as are all the other books except Farmer Boy, there are chapters here in close third-person focused on Almanzo as well. We get a glimpse into his head, his experiences, all with the delicious knowledge that he and Laura will some day be married.

Eleanor picked up on the narrative change, and we got to talk about how Wilder, as an author, is making us feel close to both characters by showing us more of what both think. She loves having knowledge of the characters' future, glimpsing the romance to come. It's also helpful when we get to a suspenseful part: "She can't die of starvation, because she has to grow up and write these books!" Eleanor looks ahead at the Garth Williams pictures and reads the chapter titles of this book and the next one, looking for hints of the future ("Mary is going to get to go to the college for the blind!").  Last night, when we had to stop just before reading a chapter whose title and illustration indicated that Pa was going to find Almanzo's hidden seed wheat, Eleanor jumped with excitement. She is utterly engaged. As am I.

Love, Annie

Life lessons, and a little more Little House

Dear Aunt Debbie,

When describing her school reading, Eleanor sometimes refers to "lesson books": books which she sees as obviously teaching a lesson or having a moral.  The most recent of these she's mentioned was called A Week Without TV (I think this is it, though I can't find a review or image online to be sure).  She recounted the plot: a boy is upset when his family's TV breaks. On each page, the text has him talking about how sad it is not to have television to watch, but the pictures show him engaged in all kinds of creative activities: drawing, playing with toys, building block towers. When the TV is finally repaired and his father asks if he wants to come watch it, the boy responds that he's too busy, and there's a picture of him fully engaged with the city he's built.

"It's a lesson book," Eleanor said, not dismissing it entirely -- she enjoyed it enough to recount the whole thing at home -- but qualifying it. The book's  purpose was clear to her, and it wasn't primarily about enjoyment of character, language, or story.

Your discussion of Thank You, Mama, has me thinking about the difference between "lesson books" and books which impart moral or behavioral lessons in more subtle ways.

As I wrote recently, we're spending a lot of time right now with the Little House books, a world rich with possibility for discussing manners and morals.  Laura, her older sister Mary, and her future husband Almanzo, in Farmer Boy, are growing up in houses where they're expected to do a hefty number of chores without complaint (this is especially true of Almanzo and his siblings, who are older than the Ingalls children in the first few books) and to be unfailingly polite to adults. Children don't speak to adults unless spoken to, especially at the dinner table. There's a heavy sense of the importance of self-sacrifice, especially coming from Laura's mother, Ma, who many people seem to feel is a wet blanket. In one episode in
Little House on the Prairie, Laura and Mary go with Pa to explore an abandoned Indian camp. They discover beautiful beads scattered in the dirt, and each girl collects a large handful. When they return to their cabin, Mary (who Laura feels is obnoxiously good) says she's going to give her beads to Baby Carrie.

Ma waited to hear what Laura would say.  Laura didn’t want to say anything.  She wanted to keep those pretty beads.  Her chest felt all hot inside, and she wished with all her might that Mary wouldn’t always be such a good little girl.  But she couldn’t let Mary be better than she was. So she said, slowly, “Carrie can have mine, too.” “That’s my unselfish, good little girls,” said Ma.

I hoped that Ma might appreciate Laura and Mary's willingness to sacrifice, but then let them keep the beads themselves -- they have so little!  But no, Ma has them string the beads for Carrie and then puts them away, because Carrie is too young and might break them. Laura is made to feel bad for wanting something of her own, and internalizes her desire as something bad:

And often after that Laura thought of those pretty beads and she was still naughty enough to want her beads for herself.

A far cry from the current feminist message of Sheryl Sandberg and her ilk....

There are obviously aspects of this way of raising kids that I don't agree with. We like it when our children speak up, and encourage them to be comfortable interacting with adults. I've never felt that instilling total self-sacrifice in my daughters was a good idea. Still, there are moments when our kids complain about cleaning their room or wail over a minor stubbed toe when I've found myself thinking, Why can't you be a little more like Laura and Almanzo?  Of course, I phrase it a little differently if I do invoke them: "Think about all the hard work Almanzo has to do every day.  We all need to pitch in and help here at home, too."  I struggle at times with how to walk that fine line between encouraging empathetic connection and behavioral modeling and spoiling a book we're all enjoying.  I suppose, as with so many other aspects of parenting, it's a balance we'll be working at for a long time.

Love, Annie

Falling in love with Little House

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Seabird sounds marvelous, and certainly something I'd like to check out with Eleanor when she comes back from the brief spring break jaunt to Mystic. As you mentioned in your last post, she has recently been captivated by a series chock-full of historical detail: the Little House books.

I'm betting that pretty much anyone reading this blog has some familiarity with Laura Ingalls Wilder's saga of her family's time as pioneer settlers in the American West.  When I was a kid, the TV series starring Melissa Gilbert was running, and I had friends who were obsessed with it, reading all the books repeatedly and role-playing Little House games.  Sun bonnets abounded.

That wasn't me. I'm pretty sure I read all nine books, because I'm a completist that way, but they weren't stories I reread.  What I retained as an adult were brief snippets of scenes -- Laura making and eating maple syrup candy by pouring it over snow; Pa running a rope between the house and the barn in the middle of the winter so he wouldn't get lost in the six-foot snowdrifts -- and the feeling that the books were otherwise a little dull.  I'd forgotten most of the narrative entirely.

Two and a half books in with Eleanor, I've fallen in love with them, and so has she.

We're reading in chronological order, so we began with Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy, and are now in the middle of Little House on the Prairie.  In the first book, Laura is five, living in a log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin with her parents (Ma and Pa), her big sister Mary, and her little sister Carrie. Farmer Boy is the story of Almanzo Wilder, who grows up to be Laura's husband. He's nine years old, living on a large, successful farm in upstate New York with his parents (Mother and Father) and three older siblings. Laura and her family don't figure into the book at all, except that readers know what Almanzo's future holds. In  Little House on the Prairie, Pa gets wanderlust, and packs up the family to move West in a covered wagon.

They make for excellent read-alouds. Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing is clear, clean, and at times quite poetic. Here she is describing six-year-old Laura's impressions of the log cabin Pa is building on the Oklahoma prairie:

Laura couldn't wait to see the inside of the house.  As soon as the tall hole was cut, she ran inside.  Everything was striped there.  Stripes of sunshine came through the cracks in the west wall, and stripes of shadow came down from the poles overhead.  The stripes of shade and sunshine were all across Laura's hands and her arms and her bare feet.  And through the cracks between the logs she could see stripes of prairie.  The sweet smell of the prairie mixed with the sweet smell of cut wood.

The level of detail in the books is tremendous, and you get a feel for how insanely much work farm families had to do in the late 1800s, and how good every family member was at doing it all. In Little House in
the Big Woods, there are descriptions of making cheese (first you need to kill a calf to get the rennet from its stomach lining), harvesting straw and braiding it to make straw hats, and how to get honey (ladle it into tubs from a dead tree after scaring off a bear).  When Pa wants to go hunting, he melts pieces of lead over the fire the night before, then pours the result carefully into his bullet mold.  Everything is handmade.  One effect of reading all of this in the comfort of my 21st-century life is to make me feel comparatively incompetent.

In Farmer Boy, the descriptions of how to do and make those things necessary for a good farming life are, if anything, even more specific. The book sometimes feels like an instruction manual for the self-sufficient life: here's how to plant potatoes, or put together a child-size bobsled, or train young oxen to pull a sled bearing a load of logs.  A couple of weeks ago, Eleanor asked me what Almanzo used to brush his hair. I said I didn't know -- it's one detail Wilder leaves out -- and she said, "They probably took a piece of stone and drilled holes in it and attached pieces of straw."  Yes, probably!

Wilder writes all of the books in third-person, though they are clearly based on her own memories. She does a beautiful job of capturing a child's perspective, and I've enjoyed noticing the differences between her narrative and Almanzo's. The greatest of these is Almanzo's focus on food.  Laura appreciates the meals Ma makes, but Almanzo's descriptions of Mother's cooking and the ways it fills his all-consuming hunger are rapturous:

Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans.  He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth.  He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy.  He ate the ham.  He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust.  He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin.  Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist.  And he ate plum preserves, and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles.  He felt very comfortable inside.  Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie.

We end a lot of chapters feeling pretty hungry ourselves.

It's easy to imagine the adult couple sitting by the fire, Almanzo telling Laura stories of his childhood, Laura pressing him for details.  My good friend Cyd has been reading the Little House books with her oldest daughter, Rebekah, who is a tremendous reader herself.  Cyd reports that when they were reading These Happy Golden Years, the story of Laura and Almanzo's courtship, Rebekah would take the book to bed and reread the romantic scenes: the first literary romance she's experienced.

I'm looking forward to continuing this journey with Eleanor in the next few months myself.

Love, Annie