The Wilder Life (24 page)

Mansfield hadn't been one of the Little House sites I'd been dying to see. It wasn't really part of the world of the books, after all, so I could only hope to feel stirred by the famed relics in the museum—things like Pa's fiddle, the glass bread plate Laura and Almanzo had bought from the Montgomery Ward catalog, the orange-covered notebooks Laura wrote the books in. But wasn't that a lot to ask from a bread plate?

I started to feel a little differently when I got the cookbook. Not the one Barbara Walker had written, but
The Laura Ingalls Wilder Country Cookbook,
which a friend of mine had sent as a gift (she insisted I make Laura's gingerbread). This one was a collection of Laura's recipes that she'd compiled during the 1930s and 1940s, classic old-fashioned fare like scalloped corn, lima bean dishes, and meatloaf, not to mention ham, chicken, and liver loaf.

Maybe I don't have to tell you that aside from the gingerbread, I wasn't exactly compelled to cook anything out of
The Laura Ingalls Wilder Country Cookbook.
But I'd become fascinated with the photos in its full-color glossy pages. Almost none of the photographs were of the recipes (because how thrilling can a salmon casserole look, anyway?); instead, they showed appealing little glimpses of the Mansfield farmhouse and still-life arrangements of its antique housewares. Glass canister jars gleamed on a shelf beneath a sunny windowsill; the paint of the front porch railing was lightly crackled as it held an earthenware bowl of lemons: all of it so perfectly shabby chic it looked like it had come straight from back issues of
Martha Stewart Living.

You could probably argue that Laura really
was
something of an early-twentieth-century Martha, for a regional audience at least, back when she wrote for the
Missouri Ruralist
and other publications during the 1910s and 1920s. The
Ruralist
was a regional newspaper that provided agricultural news, farming advice, and general-interest articles to readers twice a month. In 1911 Laura had started writing for the paper after a speech she'd written for a local farm group about raising chickens (she'd become something of an expert on the subject) impressed the editor. For the next decade or so she wrote dozens of articles about family life, home-oriented values, and matters of farm business; eventually she had her own column titled “As a Farm Woman Thinks.”

I feel a bit faithless when I confess I'm not really a fan of Laura's
Ruralist
writing. I suppose it's partly because I've never much gone for that kind of journalism—the life's-little-observations, common-sense wisdom stuff full of anecdotes and aphorisms. Almost anything in that genre feels musty to me, even if it was written last week, much less ninety years ago. The
Ruralist
columns are also where those well-known Laura quotations come from—the two or three slightly hoary, interchangeable lines about the value of “sweet, simple things” that I see endlessly quoted.

I know in these columns she spoke on behalf of farm wives, who were shrewd businesswomen and equal partners with their husbands, and I appreciate that she was opinionated, but my eyes get heavy every time I read more than a couple starchy paragraphs about the values of hard work and neighborliness and moderation and so on. The Laura who wrote these things isn't quite the Laura I know, more like a know-it-all aunt droning on and on: “It may well be that it is not our work that is so hard for us as the dread of it and our often expressed hatred of it,” she says in a 1920 column. “Perhaps it is our spirit and attitude toward life, and its conditions that are giving us trouble instead of a shortage of time.” I suppose she's got a point there, but
zzzz
.

And yet even in this non–Little House era of Laura's writing career there are things that I love about her. One of my favorite articles is a magazine piece, written with Rose's help, called “My Ozark Farm Kitchen,” in which she describes (and shows in photographs), the ingenious cabinetry and shelves Almanzo had custom-built for the Mansfield farmhouse; she made it sound as wondrous as anything Pa had ever put together, only with a distinctly grown-up sense of delight that for me is every bit as satisfying as flipping through the Container Store catalog. I am also fond of a
Ruralist
column called “The Home Beauty Parlor,” which includes advice like “Washing in buttermilk will whiten the hands and face. Fresh strawberries rubbed on the skin will bleach it, and rhubarb and tomatoes will remove stains from the fingers,” all of which makes Laura's Ozark farm kitchen sound like some kind of wonderful organic-chic retro day spa.

Never mind those old chestnuts about self-reliance in the
Ruralist
columns; if Laura launched a home décor/lifestyle magazine called
Simple Things
I would totally subscribe to it. But I'd settle for visiting the house in Mansfield.

It was impossible to miss the farmhouse from the road. It was perched high on a green hill surrounded by giant old trees, a simple but stately white clapboard house with two porches and a stone chimney. I'd expected the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum to be a sleepy kind of place, as tranquil as the house always appeared in pictures, but as I drove up I saw modern buildings alongside the house and realized it was a fairly bustling complex with the museum, the educational center, a gift shop, and a parking lot across the highway.

It was a tight operation. When I went into the museum and paid my admission, the woman at the front desk launched into a memorized spiel: the house tour was forty-five minutes long; visitors must wait for the tour time on their tickets; visitors weren't allowed to take photos in the museum or the farmhouse, only outdoors; visitors could browse in the museum until their tour began. “Uh, can I come back into the museum after the tour?” I asked the woman, a sharp-eyed woman with salt-and-pepper hair. Her name tag said PAM.

“Oh, you'll have to,” she replied. “There's so much you'll really need to come back to see it all,” she said, as if I had no choice.

But Pam was right: I only had to glance at the huge room and the rows of glass cases to see that there was more Laura stuff under this roof than anywhere else in the world. The other homesites might have a few of the Ingalls family quilts or a couple of Laura's china place settings, but clearly this was the mother lode, a lifetime's worth of possessions. It was almost too much to take in at once—all the cases of yellowing handkerchiefs, gloves, letters with faded handwriting, bits of needlework, everything labeled with little typed cards. So much of it was unremarkable at first glance but utterly precious once you looked closely. Here were Laura and Mary's school slates and the china jewel box that Laura had received for Christmas in
On the Banks of Plum Creek
! So many of the photos I'd seen over the years were here, too, in their original form: Ma and Pa's wedding tintype, the Ingalls family portrait that the woman at the Little House on the Prairie site in Kansas couldn't bear to look at. Mary's artifacts were particularly poignant: one case held the beadwork trinkets Mary had made at the Iowa College for the Blind, her Braille books, the letters she'd written on the special slate that kept her handwriting straight.

Certain pieces were iconic; Pa's fiddle was in a display case all its own, its tuning screws ancient. Every so often it was carefully taken out and played at festivals by professional musicians. The bread plate from
The First Four Years
was heavy and chipped. The infamous lap desk where the hundred-dollar bill had been misplaced was in its own case, too; lest anyone forget the lap desk's significance, a fake bill was sticking out from under its lid.

There was a white lawn dress that Laura had made and worn in one of my favorite photos, one where she's standing at the edge of a spring at Rocky Ridge Farm. It was taken at a distance and the dress made her a pale figure in the deep shade of the trees. Now it hung on a dress form in a glass case, small but life-sized. I stared down at its shoulders and its high pretty neckline trying to sense what Laura's physical presence would have been like. The figure I imagined had enough substance to be a real person but was still somehow slight, ghostly and remote enough to live in the world of a story.

When it was time for the house tour, about a dozen of us gathered at the museum door. The woman waiting in front of me seemed vaguely familiar; from the way she kept glancing back, she seemed to think that about me, too.

“Didn't we see you yesterday?” she asked me finally. “At the Little House on the Prairie?” I suddenly remembered the family of seven who'd driven up in the minivan; I'd seen them filing out of the cabin in Kansas. They were following the same course I was. As soon as we made the connection, she turned and announced it to her family. “Guess what, this lady is seeing all the Laura things, too!”

Her name was Karen, her husband was Keith. Their children ranged in ages from about five to preteen: two boys, three girls, including seven-year-old blond twins. The family hailed from Houston. Here, as in Kansas, they seemed to give off the sort of exuberant team spirit that would no doubt make them an excellent casting choice for one of the friendlier reality shows; they'd be the folks you'd root for.

I also struck up a conversation with a woman named Catherine Pond, who was especially excited to see the kitchen. It turned out she was a writer and architectural historian who had written a book about the history of pantries in American houses. When she mentioned this, it launched us both into an excited recollection of the various pantries in the Little House books. Catherine's favorite was the one described at the end of
These Happy Golden Years,
in the house Almanzo built.

“With all the little drawers for the sugar and the flour?” Catherine said. “I loved that!”

“Yes! And remember the one in the surveyors' house?” That was from
By the Shores of Silver Lake,
when the Ingalls family spends the winter in a well-stocked house owned by the railroad company; I lived for the description of the neat shelves full of abundance.

“You have to read this article Laura wrote about the kitchen in the house here,” Catherine told me.

“Oh my God! ‘My Ozark Farm Kitchen'? I loved that!” I was practically squealing like a fan girl. I was beginning to feel at home here.

We were all led into the educational center to watch a short introductory video, a brief history of the Ingalls and the Almanzo Wilder families. You could hear audio of Pa's fiddle being played and even of Laura herself speaking in a rare interview. Although her elderly voice was unlovely—sort of flat and jowly—I loved hearing it and delighted in discovering, when she mentioned Mary's education, that she pronounced “Iowa” with a long
a,
as in “Ioway College of the Blind in Vinton, Ioway.”

Then we went on into the house, led by an older lady with a pulchritudinous Ozark accent. (She referred to the home's residents as “Lawra” and “Almayanzo.”) Although the kitchen didn't have a pantry, it was every bit as retro fabulous as I'd hoped: we all admired the gleaming enamel cookstove, the patterned wallpaper, the cheery yellow-painted cabinetry. My new friend Catherine approved. Even the “modern” refrigerator, installed in the 1950s, was now charmingly vintage. The counters and cabinets and even the ceiling were low, since Almanzo had built the whole house to fit Laura and himself, both short-statured. My friend Justin had visited the house on a field trip when he was a kid and had warned me that the place would look like “a freakin' fun house,” but it was really enchanting. Everyone in our group seemed to agree, including a retired contractor. “A place will still sell if you customize it,” he said, as if he were giving Laura and Almanzo free advice on their remodeling decisions.