THE WEEKENDER

I met Amy and Deborah in a town that I have visited a thousand times. Honestly, it was not far from where I grew up, but we managed to see things and explore areas that I had never seen before. I actually went inside the Price Tower instead of just seeing it from the road and then we discovered another tower in a park that I had no idea existed. That was called the Play-Tower and it was built in 1963 by Bruce Goff, commissioned by Mrs. Harold C. Price. The spiral staircase takes you up six feet to a steel ball and is rather terrifying, because once at the top, you can feel the tower swaying back and forth. When we made it back down, the three of spent the rest of trip complaining about our old lady knees. As per usual, there was lots and lots talking and lots and lots of laughter and lots and lots of snacks.

My drive to and from our meeting space had me traveling old country highways and somewhere in Kansas, I passed a sign for a Little House on the Prairie homestead, one that I don’t remember every noticing before. Talaura, Michael and I visited the homestead in South Dakota and we dragged the Cabbage to the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home in Mansfield MO, but I didn’t realize there was a place in Kansas so close to the OK border. So on my way home from the weekend, I followed the signs and took a detour. I was the only person in the parking space outside the homestead. It is currently closed for the winter, but you are still free to roam the property. There is a replica of the original log cabin built in 1870 by the Ingalls. The other buildings came later, after the Ingalls had moved back up to Pepin WI.

The Ingalls family moved around a lot and not from town to town. They moved state to state, which is impressive considering they were traveling by wagon.

As I made my way around the property, a very vague and dreamy memory kept nudging the back of my brain. I could have sworn a preschool version of me, along with a group of other preschoolers ran around this place like the feral children we were. I can almost hear the slightly stern voice of a woman trying to wrangle us up. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and juice boxes made up our picnic lunch. If this is a true memory, I can assure you that I was wearing a prairie inspired dress with a matching bonnet. I don’t know what my obsession with all things Little House is all about. I read all the books and watched the TV show and reruns of the TV show, but I don’t remember reading the books over and over the way I did Little Women. Yet there was, is, still something about prairie life that hooked me. I spent hours building an imaginary homestead in our pasture when I was little. I spent hours imagining living life on the prairie while I was actually living life on a prairie.

Building something from nothing.

I think this is what I am drawn too in these stories and the real places that birthed those stories. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family reinvented themselves over and over, move after move. When the first life they tried to build broke, they moved on to build a new life, starting practically from scratch each time. And there were times when it may have felt impossible to rebuild. There were times so awful, that Laura Ingalls Wilder couldn’t or wouldn’t write about them. Yet the family not only survived, but thrived so much so that we know their names and the stories Laura wrote feel like stories about our own grandparents. Life on the prairie forces resilience. I may have been raised in modern times, but I was still raised on prairie land. My high school’s neighbor was a dairy farm and we participated in more tornado drills than fire drills. Though, my HS was evacuated more than once due to wildfires. Bouquets of prairie flowers were clenched in my hands often wilting before I made it home from whatever pasture adventure I had been on. I know the tunes from the area songbirds.

I told Michael my plans for a moose hunt this summer and he is onboard for this adventure. We have started planning and plotting our route, a route that will take us very close to two other Laura Ingalls Wilder homesites. Homes I have yet to visit. I am placing pins in those towns with intentions for stopping on our way back home. I figure this could be my consolation for hunting imaginary creatures and coming up empty handed.