Covered wagons and mackinaws

I slowly reread through my old boxed set of Little House on the Prairie books over the last year.  I loved these books when I was younger, and partly in rereading them is trying to figure out why I loved them as much as my dog-eared, yellow paged, broken spine books suggest. And for those dear readers who call sacrilege here, stuff it. My books are well-worn and well-loved, even if held together with tape.

What has struck me this time around, and twenty-odd years after reading this the first time, are the interesting tensions occurring in them. I still connect with Laura's desire to keep moving and her inner fight to not be settled down, with Charles Ingalls's need for space and adventure--even at the expense and detriment to his growing family of women. I still think Mary is boring as she has always been, even as she confesses her difficulties with being good, and Ma has some pretty interesting ideas for being broke and living in shanties. Carrie is timid and flat with those tears always brimming in her blue cornflower eyes, and Grace is just there.  Ma, despite all of these concerns and expectations, still follows her husband to the ends and edges of society, dragging her little china shepherdess with them, finally putting her foot down in the Dakotas and refusing to go on to Oregon.  If Ma yearns and aches at all, we see this only in quiet, subtle ways, as when she rushes to get a letter back to family or is uncertain about the styles of women's clothing that are fashionable in the east. It is Laura, as we all know, who is the lifeblood of these books: she feels, she aches, she fights, she lives in a way that the other female characters do not or cannot in these books.  Laura didn't fear the things that Ma and Mary did. She was fearful but often bucked up for the others, squaring her shoulders and marching on. She struggled with being female and being constricted and confined by the work, bonnets, shoes, and a corset. She didn't want to go to school, she didn't want to teach, and she didn't rest comfortably in the expectations that females faced.

Apparently not fulfilled with this series, I reread Mrs. Mike and The Snow Child--Mrs. Mike before our decision to move was made and The Snow Child after. Long, cold, heartbreaking winters followed by summers of endless sunshine (and mosquitoes) dotted with tender moments and awe fill these pages. I think this is also why I enjoy fantasy and sci-fi; those stories explore a different edge, but still seek that vastness and the placement of humanity within that.  In each of these, there is a nudging at words to describe the vastness of nature, the sweeping scenery, and the feeling of being utterly small and insignificant in the great march of life and this world. It isn't grasping, but I imagine more a holding of the words and letting them sift through the fingers, like sand at the beach. That word is the tiny shell that doesn't fall through but fits well, if a bit imprecisely, because how do we really write pure emotion or experience?

In a world driven by ego and self, and I realize the difficulty of trying to explain this as I write a blog people read that is its own way of being seen, it is this smallness, this insignificance that I crave. There is an indifference that comes with living in the city with neighbors stacked on top of each other, but not necessarily insignificance because we strive to be seen in so many ways, both literally ("don't hit me with your car!") and metaphorically ("I just wish someone would care enough..."). Our neighbors see us through the fence, hear us through open windows, and I often feel watched, whether this is done intentionally or unintentionally.

I want to stretch--something I have apparently been doing or trying to do for much of my existence, according to my mother--and to carve out our own little space. I long for and tremble at the thought of this very big, looming trip in a way that the move four years ago didn't leave me feeling, much as I imagine these fictional characters and the real women they are founded on (at least in two of the stories) must have felt. I can shed some things that I have struggled against here and continue to shape me, reshifting priorities and visions. It's a grand adventure, miles, and cold, and mosquitoes, and all.