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I can’t believe that I haven’t written about Little House in the Big Woods before: it really ought to be near the top of any list of 100 Books that Influenced Me. Maybe I was having trouble picking which Little House book to write about, because I also adored The Long Winter (the hardship! The cold! The never-ending snow! The kindling twisted out of straw and the wheat ground into flour in the coffee mill!) and over time Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years have grown on me…
I loved what you might call the how-to aspect of the book - because a large part of the narrative is just description after description of how to do things: make butter or smoke meat or make shiny little bullets that burn a little girl’s fingers when she can’t resist touching them. It appeals to the same part of me that loved to sit and watched the bobbin lace maker at GlobalFest for ages: there’s just something wonderful about watching or reading about people making things, especially things that require great skill.
But Little House in the Big Woods remains my favorite. It’s one of the most perfect evocations of the experience of being a five-year-old that’s ever been written; I say this on the authority of having first heard the book when I was four or five and identifying so intensely with Laura that I called my self-insert characters Laura for years afterward.
And the food descriptions! My God, the food! The attic full of pumpkins, the butter colored with carrots (and Laura and Mary snarfing down the milk-soaked grated carrots as a treat: truly a different time), the smokehouse made out of an old hollow leg fed with hickory chips, that releases the faint enticing smell of smoking venison around the house. The entire pig-butchering sequence, with the head cheese, and Laura and Mary cooking the pig’s tail in the open stove. The sugaring off.
The scene where the sugar waxes and the children get to pour it into the snow and it hardens instantly into candy and they can eat as much as they want was basically my ultimate dream of happiness when I was a small child. The whole book gives me the same cozy feeling expressed in the ending of the novel, when Laura lies in her trundle bed and thinks to herself:
“This is now.”
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
I loved what you might call the how-to aspect of the book - because a large part of the narrative is just description after description of how to do things: make butter or smoke meat or make shiny little bullets that burn a little girl’s fingers when she can’t resist touching them. It appeals to the same part of me that loved to sit and watched the bobbin lace maker at GlobalFest for ages: there’s just something wonderful about watching or reading about people making things, especially things that require great skill.
But Little House in the Big Woods remains my favorite. It’s one of the most perfect evocations of the experience of being a five-year-old that’s ever been written; I say this on the authority of having first heard the book when I was four or five and identifying so intensely with Laura that I called my self-insert characters Laura for years afterward.
And the food descriptions! My God, the food! The attic full of pumpkins, the butter colored with carrots (and Laura and Mary snarfing down the milk-soaked grated carrots as a treat: truly a different time), the smokehouse made out of an old hollow leg fed with hickory chips, that releases the faint enticing smell of smoking venison around the house. The entire pig-butchering sequence, with the head cheese, and Laura and Mary cooking the pig’s tail in the open stove. The sugaring off.
The scene where the sugar waxes and the children get to pour it into the snow and it hardens instantly into candy and they can eat as much as they want was basically my ultimate dream of happiness when I was a small child. The whole book gives me the same cozy feeling expressed in the ending of the novel, when Laura lies in her trundle bed and thinks to herself:
“This is now.”
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
