Doris Lessing once wrote that every book has its season in your life, and suggested that if a book isn’t working for you, set it down and try again in 10 or 20 years. I have found that this is also often true for books I like: sometimes I like them later for the same reasons, and other times my age-based shift in perspective gives me an entirely new understanding.
As a child I adored the “Little House on the Prairie” books and identified strongly with Laura, the American pioneer girl who is the book’s protagonist. The autobiographical events in the book just seemed like grand adventures for the most part. As an adult and a parent? Positively hair-raising. It seems like the mom and dad each nearly dies at least twice in each book, and in one book in particular (”The Long Winter”) the entire family nearly starves to death. And the astonishing thing is how positive and reassuring the parents are, even when they have to be scared to death.
In the book I just finished, “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” the dad is caught outside in a major blizzard and spends several days in a snow cave with only his coat and some Christmas candy to sustain him. In the meantime the mom and three daughters are inside waiting and worrying. The mom, calm as always, plays games with the girls, helps them do their housework, and encourages them to work on their studies — and all the time you know she has to be panicking, thinking that her husband is lost forever and she’s stuck in a dugout with basically nothing, in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, with three mouths to feed.
Of course her patience and persistence are rewarded and the dad shows up as soon as the storm abates. But the sheer imagined terror of this and many other similar events in the series has me convinced that I could never have made it as a pioneer, whatever fantasies I might have indulged as a child.
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