It felt like homework, and after a while I wondered what was the advantage of writing one's name this way, when you could just take a Magic Marker and be done in ten seconds.
I was trying to spell out my name is wendy mcclure. The needle kept becoming unthreaded, and more than once I accidentally sewed the embroidery hoop to my skirt. For instance, the sewing presented itself in the form of my grandma's embroidery lessons, but despite my early Little House-inspired enthusiasm, I didn't have the patience couldn't take how slow and laborious it was to stitch just one letter on the sampler I was doing. I say I wanted to do all these things, though that may not have been what I truly desired. Ride on the back of a pony just by hanging on to its mane. Chase a horse and/or ox into a barn stall. Have a man's hands span my corseted waist, which at the time didn't seem creepy at all. Sew a seam with tiny and perfectly straight stitches. There were a host of other things from the books that I remember I wanted to do, too, such as: I wanted go out into the backyard and just, I don't know, grab stuff off trees, or uproot things from the ground, and bring it all inside in a basket and have my parents say, "My land! What a harvest!" I wanted dead rabbits brought home for supper.
Carry water, churn butter, make headcheese. I wanted to do chores because of those books. I wanted to wear a calico sunbonnet-or rather, I wanted to not wear a calico sunbonnet, the way Laura did, letting it hang down her back by its ties. The words plodded along reliably, like the feet of Indian ponies.Īnd, oh my God: I wanted to live in one room with my whole family and have a pathetic corncob doll all my own. I remember studying the list of books in the series their titles appeared in small caps in the front matter of every book, and I loved the way the list had its own rhythm: Little House in the Big Woods.
Sometimes I found the battered old hardcovers on the shelves, multiple copies of each book in thick plastic jackets. Most of the Little House books I read came from the public library, usually off the paperback racks-the Harper Trophy editions with the yellow borders and spines, their corners worn soft after years of circulation. If you had every last log cabin and covered wagon and iron stove needed to conjure this world up, you couldn't, not completely: it's a realm that gets much of its power from single things-the lone doll, trundle bed, china shepherdess, each one realer than real. The Little House world is at once as familiar as the breakfast table and as remote as the planets in Star Wars. Toast or no toast, I think I've made my point here. (Though yes, there are those of you who will no doubt point out that, actually, the Little House books have hardly any toast at all, that in fact The Long Winter is the only book in the series in which toast appears, and then only once do the Ingallses get to even butter it before the town gets snowed in and provisions run low, and then the toast is eaten plain or dipped in tea for the next five months and two hundred pages, and the flour that they make the bread from in the fi rst place is ground from seed wheat in the coffee mill with the little iron hopper and the tiny wooden drawer, and after Ma bakes the bread she makes a button lamp, because do you remember the button lamp, in the saucer, with the little square of calico that she twists up and greases into a wick? Shall we go on?) I pored over the page spreads in Richard Scarry's Book of Something-or-Other, looking at all the little rooms whose con¬tents were meticulously catalogued and the dressed-up raccoons and pigs and squirrels who sat in them, drinking "coffee" and listening to the "radio" and eating, yes, "toast." I had, and loved, a battered 1960s-era "pictionary" with wagons and hot dogs and butter dishes floating in plotless arrangements on the page. Well, not just toast, but, you know, cups and ladles and baskets and hats, lovingly rendered, all in their places in a room or even just in little vignettes, but at any rate, things, in all their thinginess. Then sometimes they go on and ask me whether I also loved various other Important Children's Books, like Where the Wild Things Are and The Little Prince and The House at Pooh Corner, and I'll do my best for a while, trying to play along, and then at some point I have to hem and haw and shrug because, well, you know what I really liked? I liked books that had pictures of toast in them. When I tell people I loved the Little House books, I know it's a perfectly respectable answer, the sort of thing folks expect me to say. Since I edit children's books for a living, I get asked a lot about my favorite books as a kid.