PART III Chapt Twelve- Like Daugher, Like Mother

Part III

Chapter 12

Like Daughter, Like Mother

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Bent over, a short, white-headed woman tosses a few chunks of oak into a red-hot cast iron stove, and clangs around in the coals with an iron rod, as sparks fly and smoke faintly trails between the glowing seams of the stovepipe. She stirs and stimulates the fire with ruthless finesse, then slams the iron door swiftly to limit the amount of heat and sparks that might escape. It is not terribly cold outside, but she loves to have a fire going, in her cozy country cottage. She plunks back down into her rocking chair, picks up her Big Chief writing tablet, and resumes on her manuscript, immediately lost in a blizzard in South Dakota, in the 1880's. A story begs to be told.

But it is the 1930's. Laura Ingalls Wilder is adding another book to her legacy of pioneer stories. Just recently she and Manly, her husband have moved back into this rustic home, one they had built themselves, long ago. She believed in her heart, and saw to it that her home should be constructed from the stones and wood derived from the very property it sat on. Just like her parents had done over and over in Kansas and Minnesota and South Dakota. Your home was your respectful extrapolation from the land you loved underneath it. You built your home like the prairie dog, or the timber wolf would, in harmony with the grand scheme of things. Laura had first seen this philosophy as a way of life among the Osage Indians, her next door neighbors as a child. She had never forgotten the simplicity and beauty of their amazingly practical village, the shelters made of branches and animal skins, the way their homes fit the landscape, like a bird's nest. She loved their elegance and the rhythms of their culture. She smiles, remembering the time she saw a beautiful Native American baby carried by its mother on her back, and she begged her mother to have one for her own. The "Indians" inspired her, challenged her, made her see the natural world as a beautiful, benevolent organism.

Her daughter Rose had built her a modern house nearby, with electricity and plumbing... and a gas heater, but it was not a home; one where she could snuggle next to a fire and remember her pioneer childhood, which now seemed to be the best of days. Her books were selling like crazy, and every moment of literary inspiration had become like gold to her. Anything to cultivate her thoughts and imagination, especially her memory, was money in the bank. She writes furiously, intensely, her confidence and flair growing after several successes with Harper and Brothers. She chews on her pencil a minute, and smiles, thinking of her precious sisters, their sweetness and courage, the way they used to function as a team. Milking the cow... her chores which she often bore alone. Mary could not see. Carrie was too little. Grace was just a toddler. She had been forced to become the alpha sister, even if she was second in line.

Laura and Mary Ingalls, closest of sisters, 

got even closer after Mary's blindness

For some reason her mind replays a repressed memory, of skipping school one day to go roller skating with them and her schoolmates... and the unfair scolding she had gotten the next day from the schoolmaster. She was the model student, and she was expected to set a better example. It seemed that Laura had been singled out all of her life. But still Laura smiles with great satisfaction. 

The best memories are usually the ones of things which were never supposed to happen. She thinks of the “Hard Winter,” and all of those people finding refuge in a house smaller than this one! And a homeless young couple to boot... and nearly frozen wild birds, finding refuge behind the pie safe. Daughter Rose would never understand what this little pioneer house means.

Rose never lived in an adobe dugout, with a dirt floor. Never lived each day for someone else, like she had for her older sister, who had gone blind... and had to be waited on for many months. Rose never even had a sister to share with or compete with her... She never learned to appreciate the simple things. Like board walls, running water, like a roof over your head. Rose meant well, but the house she built was more for her own ego than for her parent's happiness. An English-style cottage- that house had no soul. It had no stories to tell. It had not been conceived with a poetic philosophy which reflected the inhabitant's background. It did not fit the author now happily feeding a wood stove next door in her own element, cranking out wonderful, soon to be classic stories of bygone days! 

Memories... and stories like that pour out of a home like this one. The popping of the burning wood becomes punctuation in a prairie weather description. The cracking of thunder across an endless plain, darkened by a deadly storm that spawns destruction and sleepless nights. It would blow in like a mad bull, would leave barns crushed and eventually herds decimated and creeks impassable... Laura writes swiftly and confidently, her hand flying, consuming the pages with the hunger she once saw in the insatiable grasshoppers who ate everything living. Hours pass.

Then the room begins to cool as the fire dies down. The draft from a cracked pane of glass allows a waft of fresh Canadian air to chill the room. Laura does not consciously take notice, but begins to describe the great tornado in her mind; An eerie greenish monster covers the sky, spawning sinister funnels, like devil's tails, randomly dispensing death and destruction. Two teen-aged boys, riding their plow mules are sucked up into the massive vortex, mules and all, and then they and it are gone. She closes her eyes and lays her head back... it is not over. A speck way up high in the sky, no a tiny, twirling rectangle, spins and spins, then suddenly swoops up... and then like a bird that tucks its wings and falls and then swoops up again... and spins and tumbles and swoooops again, Laura imagines watching it fly down to earth... just as she had heard so many times by witnesses, how a farmhouse was taken up and away, swallowed by the sky, and then given just the front door back, safely landing on the ground, intact, a souvenir of the freakish, powerful storm.

“Bessie,” Manly says meekly, “are you thinkin' 'bout supper? This old day is gettin' long in the tooth...”

Laura looks at the clock. It is already 5:30. She should have been preparing supper an hour ago!

“Of course!” She retorts, “You haven't missed too many meals, old man! But if you're wantin' dinner this evening you better bring me some more firewood! You probably forgot that we are not in the cottage, an' we're eatin' off of the wood stove again.”

“I didn't forget” Manly corrects her... “this was your idea...” he will not say anymore, but smiles as he pulls on his coat and heads for the door. He would move into a grass hut if she wanted to. Manly has spent a lifetime making her wishes come true, always considering himself the luckiest man in the world, to be her man. To him, she was still the spritely girl who stole his rational mind many years ago...

Laura was that "special" child,

 the star student, the belle of the ball

Manly has spent a lifetime thanking God that Laura's wishes were those of a simple country girl. They had each discovered their wants and knew their abilities when they chose to get married. She never asked for more than he could deliver. He never offered less than she could accept.

                                     “//”

"Welcome to my little house in the woods... I'm always afraid when people meet me that they are going to be disappointed... The famous author, people expect some kind of scholar or intellectual. When I speak to groups sometimes, I try to act more like my daughter Rose, she is so natural in front of people. I went most of my life an' never saw a group larger than a church revival.

Charles Ingalls

"We were mostly prairie people. My father had started out a lumberjack but turned to farming... we tried inn-keeping, then he worked as a clerk for the railroad; the one time he actually got a salary! And we lived well then. He once had a butcher shop... and he often worked as a carpenter... or hired out to other farms, when his crop had failed, which it often did... and he served as the Justice of the Peace, and County Commissioner... Pa was the “Jack of all trades,” and then some. But all along, we were just plain folks. I'm no celebrity or socialite, would not know how to be... never wanted to be. And when I married Manly, I was already married to the prairie.

"My daughter Rose encouraged me to tell the stories of my childhood, to write 'em down. So I did, and she helped me, she edited the stories, found me an agent. I was so crushed when they rejected the first one! I laugh at myself now. I would have given up right then, but Rose would not let it go... She told me how to fix it, and sure enough, they printed it, and gave me a contract. If it had not been for her...

"Are you hungry? I have a pot of coffee on... and fresh baked muffins! Everybody raves about them!

Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her prime

"You see I was just a hometown columnist, when I began to discover my writing ability... fairly late in life. I was thrilled to get printed in the local paper or a magazine, that was the big time! Rose always encouraged me, pushed me to pursue it. So we have been more like best friends in recent years, my daughter and I. But she was a handful growing up...

"I could not handle her. Smart? Oh my, too smart for Manly and me. And an only child after my son died.. She worked us against each other, and Manly was always indulging her, he knew I guess, but did not want to fight… acted like her little manipulations were cute. Made me be the bad guy. So we had pretty much had enough of each other when Manly's sister offered to take her on. I was so grateful. E. J. was good with kids, she had been a teacher, and she seemed to understand Rose. They were alike in many ways.

"E.J." Eliza Jane Wilder

"It took a while... and a lot of miles, one day she just snapped. But Rose finally grew into a good woman, someone we are proud of, and after awhile she came back and we got along a lot better. She was out in San Francisco, married to that con-man. Oh maybe I'm too hard on him, but they were a dangerous pair. It was 1915 and she wrote me an' really, she begged me to come out there. It was exciting and so I did, and that was when she showed me what writing could amount to... but I never imagined that I could do it. But she showed me I could.

"She divorced Claire or whatever his name was and came home for awhile... She was a different person. And some for the better.

"Of course she had been through a lot. Life taught her what I could not. I had seen it coming, but a parent cannot stop a willful child from self-destruction. Manly would have chained her to the bedpost, as they say... We cried many a tear... But they have to learn the hard way. And she did. Married, divorced... even tried... to kill herself.

"I'm sorry, I did not plan on crying, (chuckles sheepishly) I need to get a handkerchief...

"It still affects me, I don't know why!

"It ab-so-lute-ly broke our hearts. But we were thousands of miles away. And it would not have mattered if we had been next door. Rose is proud. She is so fierce and damned hard-headed. Excuse my French. Like me I guess. She always thought she knew everything... and she usually did! But when she was wrong, Oh God! She was the kind of person that only terrible mistakes and the grief from them could tame.

"It was horrific, the hardest thing I ever had to do... just to watch... and pray."

"But thanks be to God she did not die, and she bounced back, and I don't know where she got it, but she was like a mad hornet on the tear, and when she got through, she nearly owned the place! She's got more talent, more nerve, more ambition than a bull buffalo. You've no doubt heard of that squatty Corsican who took over France and almost conquered the world? Napoleon? THAT was Rose. Brilliant. Self-assured. Sometimes condescending. Takes no prisoners.

"No, I owe a lot to my daughter, and mostly for not giving up on her father and me. 'Lot of girls like her leave and never come back. Very few do come back without tellin' you off first- then asking for money! How many come back, spend quality time, you know, pulling weeds, drinking coffee, and help you start a career in writing when you are in your fifties, and build you a house with their own money? Well I can tell you! None! She is one in a million.

"All while she was carving out a writing career for herself! She was famous before I ever tried my hand at writing. No, she is the one who you should be interviewing. She's in Connecticut now, has her own place... but she still reads my manuscripts for me... actually types them- turns them into English! I wouldn't trust anybody else.

"As far as the writing, I don't really understand all the fuss. I just write from my life, tell how things felt when they were happening, try to share the wonderful spirit of the American pioneers. The beauty we saw. The perfection. It was perfection you know.

"Simple. Beautiful. It had integrity."

"There were no boundaries to a man's dreams. He could wish as far as he could see. And he could see for miles. Very few people ever realize their dreams, but everybody has them. You see, you learn out on the prairie, how to size-up people... by the dreams they dream.

"People were much closer to nature out there. Children understood things about life by growing up in the barnyard. The birds and the bees so to speak. People understood that it was God who provided everything we were trying to harness into a living... it was God who gave. It was God who took away. Living like that drew us closer to Him, and to each other. If it all seems different or more idyllic then than now, that's because it was.

                                        

                                               Laura and Mary, soon to be separated.

"Livin'- dyin'- being born- suffering, prospering was all part of some grander purpose that we could not see but we believed... trusted God. We did not spend a lot of time being jealous or mad with each other. Life was too short, too fragile to waste that way. Pettiness and selfishness was not tolerated. You needed each other, just to survive, and the desire to survive motivated you to be acceptable to others. A nasty encounter with your neighbor in the summer might turn into the inability to borrow medicine or some essential in the middle of winter- that could result in the loss of someone's life. No, we bent over backwards for people whom we sometimes had to hold our noses to be around!

 "We are often discouraged by some people's behavior, and in those times we have to assume something my Daddy often said: 'That 'people are doin' the best they can.'

"We were raised to give people the 'benefit of the doubt.' That saying made me a lot more charitable... as I tended to be quite judgmental. But I have to admit that Rose got a dose of that as well, and she never bought into that idea... of social grace. No, she was a Wilder, through and through. A thoroughbred. Just like Eliza Jane. Superior and modern an' all... If I didn't know better I would say she was her child!