Status Updates From Prairie Fires: The American...

She always remembered that place, that moment, “a wild, beautiful little body of water, a resting place for the wild water birds of all kinds, many varieties of ducks, wild geese, swans, and pelicans.”

“ Life in frontier times was a perpetual hard winter. There was joy—riding ponies, singing hymns, eating Christmas candy—but it was fleeting. There was heroism, but it was the heroism of daily perseverance, the unprized tenacity of unending labor. It was the heroism of chores, repetitive tasks defined by drudgery. Cooking and eating the same fried potatoes, day in and day out. Washing dishes in dirty water.” Reallife

“Ninety-one percent of farmers are dependent on multiple sources of “off farm” income, just as Laura Ingalls Wilder was, and her father before her.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/op...

Interesting in light of the WWOOF trend, a touristic taste of the hard life, “immediate gratification,” shallow, dip in and dip out.

“ Visible off the county road, like a disgruntled dipper on the land the Osage once patrolled, an oil derrick pumps”

“ Yards behind the quaint replica of the “little house on the prairie,” built in the 1970s to celebrate the television show, lies a buried Enbridge petroleum pipeline that can carry more than half a million barrels of crude a day from Illinois to Oklahoma, a “quiet clone” of the controversial Keystone XL.”

“ Wilder’s hometowns are a mute witness to what has happened to small-town farming and self-reliance, lost to taxes, to banks, to big business. We know, or should know, that Independence, Kansas, is now more closely associated with oil wells than wheat.”

“But nostrums have a way of papering over contradictions. The New York Times asked recently, “Why Do People Who Need Help from the Government Hate It So Much?”6 It was no mystery to Wilder. As she knew too well, people who are poor are ashamed. It’s easier to blame the government than to blame yourself. Wrestling with shame was one of the reasons she wrote her books”

“her abhorrence of dependency was rooted in the humiliations she had worked so hard to leave behind. She herself had been dependent before, on a father forced to accept flour from the state of Minnesota, on a husband forced to sell his land after failing on his homestead… For her, the very idea of dependence was wreathed with shame, the most deranging of human emotions.”

The context of the war: “ended with the laconic Almanzo and the reluctant Curley dedicating themselves to the wholesome pursuit of farming. And both offered wartime America a retreat from the internecine mechanized warfare that was consuming the planet.”

stoicism… apathy… colorism… really interesting discussion of how much lane hated FDR and big government while being the least independent individual herself….

“… never forgotten the sight and sound of wild birds migrating across its marshes or the image of wolves on its shores. She had felt in her core the last of the wilderness passing into oblivion and mourned its disappearance, making the loss a leitmotif of her books as it had been in her father’s life.”

“It was this ambiguous relationship to the truth that enabled Wilder to transform her family’s lifelong struggles into a sterling portrait of indomitability, security, and success…She seemed ever more invested in presenting her idealized view of her parents as factual, fulfilling a deep longing within herself not only to preserve their legacy but to elevate it, elevating herself in the process. …to have it both ways”