A Family Collection:

Life on the Farm and in the Country, Making a Home; the Ways of the World, a Woman's Role

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Selected articles written by Laura Ingalls Wilder for The Missouri Ruralist newspaper. The idea of this collection was to let us know what happened in the time between settling on Rocky Ridge Farm as a farm wife and producing beloved classics of children's fiction.  I can't say that the collection succeeded in its mission, but it did give us a glimpse of what she was really doing all those years. Farming is hard work, but living close to the earth is worth the work.

Some are instructive in a practical manner; some promote women's importance to the economy; all have moral overtones, but oh, so gentle is her prodding!  And in that elegant, nineteenth century prose!  (although they were written after the turn of the century)

Spring has come! The wild birds have been singing the glad tidings for several days, but the are such optimistic little souls that I always take their songs of spring with a grain of pessimism. The squirrels and chipmunks have been chattering to me, telling me the same news, but they are such cheerful busy-bodies tht I never believe quite all they say.

She continues with an exhortation to picnickers to clean up their litter, but you get the idea. She's working hard and enjoying her life. When you're doing what you want and living as you please, maybe you don't feel so great a need to write your life history. That came later, when she grew older.

One more quote:

I have a feeling that childhood has been robbed of a great deal of its joys by taking away its belief in wonderful, mystic things, in fairies and all their kin...  A young friend with whom I talked the other day said that life was so "much more interesting" to her since she "began to look below the surface of things and see what what beneath." There are deeps beyond deeps in the life of this wonderful world of ours. Let's help the children to see them....