“A template for the future”
At ten, I was a shy, chubby, nonathletic child with a very intense inner life. I asked my mom to drop me at the library on Saturdays, rather than find friends to play with.
On one of those Saturdays I discovered the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder and it was one of the greatest things ever to happen to me. I entered a world where things were ordered, simple, and predictable. Laundry was on Monday. Ironing was on Tuesday. At certain times of the year, a pig was killed. Relatives came to visit. People made maple syrup.
These things soothed me. My childhood was so fantastically chaotic and unpredictable, with the complicating factors of drug addiction and fame in my father, and utter misery and sometimes hysteria in my mother. When Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about Ma setting the table for dinner and how the light looked when it came through the window from the prairie, and how Pa played the fiddle in the evenings—it gave me the courage to face my own life and my own family. It gave me peace, and a template for the future.
I retreated into those books. I don’t know that I had a conscious knowledge of what it was doing for me—the very ordering of my soul—but I felt it. Later, when I read the series to my own children, I realized what it had given me, and the pleasure of giving it to my children was just as acute and sweet.
I wanted to keep my copies pristine. Write in the margins? Never! Sacrilege! I did not race through these books. I savored them. I reread passages over and over. I still think of scenes from the series. The Long Winter has become my favorite over time. Now that I’m writing books, too, I can see that Ingalls Wilder’s prose has had an effect on my own. Her meticulously careful observation of a scene, a person, the light, the feel of the cashmere, the sound of the fiddle, the color of Mary’s eyes, the print of the tablecloth, the shock on baby Grace’s face when she is reprimanded. All those tiny observations made an enormous impact on me. I endeavor to be that careful.
Laura’s steadfastness pleases me so much. I go back to the books and there she is, same as ever. It’s all still happening. When I read the series to my son, when he was about eight, and who is now sixteen, he was just as riveted as I was the first time I encountered the series. He loved The Long Winter just as much as me. The only things he resisted were the “peripheral” stories of Almanzo’s childhood and Rose’s story. I was a little disappointed, but realized he’s even more of a purist than me.
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Rosanne Cash is an American singer-songwriter and author. She is the eldest daughter of the late country music singer Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin. Her 2010 memoir, Composed, details her upbringing and her launch as a musician.