Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

So the past couple of weeks I've been going down memory lane and re-reading all of the "Little House on the Prairie" books. If you've never read them, I recommend them.

It is the story of the Ingalls family moving from place to place during Laura's childhood. The main character is Laura, but her entire family is involved as well. There is one book about Almanzo Wilder's childhood, who eventually becomes Laura's husband.

They are very simply written and mostly what I think Mrs. Wilder is doing is displaying how hard life was then. I'm not sure that she ever saw a big city until she was MUCH older. Her family kept moving to more and more remote areas (or once back into a more civilized area) so all of the food they ate they basically had to make themselves.

Mrs. Wilder describes making cheese and bread (without so much as a pack of yeast!), going months without seeing milk, because they didn't have a milk cow, or theirs had dried up. The book that hit me was "The Long Winter" because they basically ran out of food when the trains couldn't get through the storms. They ate wheat that was ground in a coffee grinder and made into coarse biscuits. That was IT. I was amazed at this life style and how convenient everything is now days. If I run out of something I can just run to the store and get more.

These books are all about Farming too. Mrs. Wilder describes out the common farmer would put everything he had (including going into debt) into his harvest and sometimes the harvest would be bad. Two years in a row when they lived in Minnesota they lost their crops to grasshopper plagues. She talks about when she married her husband, Almanzo, how she didn't want to be dependent on a farm any more, so they had a deal that they could try farming for three years and if it didn't work out, Almanzo would do something else. It didn't work out and they barely were able to make ends meet and at the end of four years (she gave an extra year as a year of grace) their house was burned to the ground. They basically lost everything, but Laura still allowed her husband to farm. It was the chance that they might make enough money to pay for their equipment and house and for groceries and have some left over that kept them farming. It wasn't at all dependable.

Really these books show the true pioneering spirit, and willingness to make something out of nothing. They are inspirational in their own way, but I'll be honest. I still wouldn't want to be married to a farmer.