The Long Winter

There's a ton of snow, and it just won't stop.  It reminds me of the Laura Ingalls Wilder book, The Long Winter, in which the entire town was snowed in with no food from October to April.  Obviously we have food and cars and central heating and running water now, so it's not the same.  But imagine being in a town in the middle of the Dakota Prairie, blizzards every other day, below zero temperatures, no trains -- it must have SUCKED.  

I'm totally and completely fascinated by all that stuff.  You would not even believe how much I know about Laura and her whole family.  There was a good solid ten years when I was obsessed with it.  I have more than half of the seasons of the TV series, I have two complete sets of the books, I have a first-edition of Little House in the Big Woods, I have read countless biographies, you ask the question, I probably know the answer.  I've read These Happy Golden Years so many times that one of my copies is literally falling apart.

My junior year of high school I volunteered at my elementary school and we ate lunch in the library.  I remembered where the little house books were so I went over there and picked them up and looked at the little paper inside the covers and my name was on each book at least four times.  What a dork!  I was Laura Ingalls for Halloween in fifth grade, complete with a real sunbonnet.  I found that costume in a drawer the other day and decided that when I'm a stage parent I'm making my daughter wear it.

Anyway, sometimes I wish I lived back then.  Things were simple then.  You woke up and did chores and went to school and church and wore dresses and went on buggy rides.  I would have been a really good frontier girl.  Can't you just see me in pigtails and a dress and a sunbonnet, milking a cow or helping make hay or riding in a wagon?

Don't answer that question.