The Little House......

“A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin”

If you follow my “What I’m Reading This Month” you’ll notice that I have a few mentions of Laura Ingalls Wilder. My copies are now dog eared  A series of 9 books which tell of her travels across America as one of the first pioneers these books have been very much loved by hundreds of children. They start off very much like JK Rowling’s book with the narrator matching Laura’s age in each book.  A preconception is that these are “girls” books, not helped by the appalling Disney TV series. However from the first the book tells the stories of bears, wolves, panthers, hunting and Indians! I have just started reading the first – Little House In the Big Woods to my eldest boy and he cant wait for the next evening and the next chapter.

“The wind was rising and wildly screaming. ... thousands of rabbits were running.... Snakes rippled across the yard.
Prairie hens ran silently, their necks outstretched and their wings spread.
Birds screamed in the screaming wind.... Great flames came roaring, flaring and twisting high.
Twists of flame broke loose and came down on the wind to blaze up in the grasses far ahead of the roaring wall of fire. A red light came from the rolling black clouds of smoke overhead.”

A fascinating series on struggling with the American wilderness, the drudgery of milking the cows, the destruction of tornados and the fear if snow blizzards. And she also wrote in stark contrast to her hard pioneer life the story of her future husband who lived on a fairly well to do farm and whose parent barely struggled.  The last of her books – The First Four Years is the only book which I feel lets the series down by the time she had unfortunately passed away before she had been given a chance to rewrite with the same glow and enchantment of her others.
If you have half an hour one day to fill I do suggest you read a couple of chapters of these classic and wonderful books!

                                                   

"Wild animals would not stay in a country where there were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being afraid.
.... There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there."