10 Times We Wished We Were Laura Ingalls Wilder

I never ran away on purpose, but once I did it by accident. I was playing Laura Ingalls Wilder, as one does, and set off on an imaginary prairie walkabout to parts unknown. It ended with my terrified parents converging on me out of nowhere, and my surprise at their not understanding the necessity of the game. (The game: walk around looking solemn and not wearing a bonnet, just like Laura. Reflect on homespun concerns. Possibly eat some pine needles, just to see.)
Such is the power of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose Little House books bind together generations of girls and women in our shared desire to chuck lives of Netflix binges and sad work lunches for the simpler pleasures of button strings and maple candy. On what would be Ingalls Wilder’s 150th birthday, let us reflect on all the times Laura was us, and we, in our wildest dreams, were Laura.
When maple + snow = the stuff of dreams
“Grandma stood by the brass kettle and with the big wooden spoon she poured hot syrup on each plate of snow. It cooled into soft candy, and as fast as it cooled they ate it. They could eat all they wanted, for maple sugar never hurt anybody.” Proposal: the Pioneer Girl diet, in which you can eat anything you want so long as it’s slathered in harmless, delicious maple sugar.
When she masterminded the revenge of the leeches
Who wouldn’t want to send their mean-girl nemesis into the clutches of the world’s most disgusting lifeform? At a party Laura throws for her classmates, mean Nellie Oleson gets a nasty comeuppance when Laura (with the help of a vindictive crab) drives her into the leech-filled waters of Plum Creek. Revenge proves even more delicious than Ma’s vanity cakes.
When she got to have the best pets ever
Let us not speak now of the death of Jack the bulldog. Instead, let’s talk about the time Pa gets the girls a 50-cent kitten so tiny it barely survives a fight with a mouse! Or the time Laura is put in charge of a newly born calf, so young she has to teach him how to drink milk. O_O
Every time Pa got out his fiddle
By all accounts Charles Ingalls was a wanderin’ man (to the point of driving his wife to distraction) with a big personality, and he could fiddle like hell. Long winters, droughts, and house fires are nothing to a man with a fiddle.
During Christmas in the big woods
On top of all the salt-rising bread and Swedish crackers and baked beans and vinegar pies (??) and dried-apple pies and salt pork with molasses, there was this: “One morning she boiled molasses and sugar together until they made a thick syrup, and Pa brought in two pans of clean, white snow from outdoors. Laura and Mary each had a pan, and Pa and Ma showed them how to pour the dark syrup in little streams onto the snow. They made circles, and curlicues, and squiggledy things, and these hardened at once and were candy.” (Recipe!)
Those sleigh rides with Alfonso
Laura’s early dates with her husband-to-be had everything: romance, sleigh bells, seeing and being seen, weather that was just this side of unbearable (“only twenty degrees below and the the sun shone”). Not to mention the moment Laura tells Almanzo to step off for good if he keeps inviting Nellie along. Nobody puts Laura in the corner of a buggy.
The part where she lives INSIDE THE BANKS OF PLUM CREEK
Is there any kid alive who wouldn’t give it all up for the chance to live in their very own hobbit-hole? It was clean enough for Ma, too. “All around that door green vines were growing out of the grassy bank, and they were full of flowers…Laura went under those singing flowers into the dugout. It was one room, all white. The earth walls had been smoothed and whitewashed. The earth floor was smooth and hard.” SWOON.
When her playing house put your playing house to shame
“The attic was a lovely place to play. The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell. Often the wind howled outside with a cold and lonesome sound. But in the attic Laura and Mary played house with the squashes and the pumpkins, and everything was snug and cozy.”
When no iGadget could beat the charms of a humble button-string
“Mary had one end of the string and Laura had the other. They picked out the buttons they wanted and strung them on the string. They held the string out and looked at it, and took off some buttons and put on others. Sometimes they took every button off, and started again. They were going to make the most beautiful button-string in the world.” WHOOOO! Sorry. It’s just…that button-string was a thrill ride.
The time she makes hay while the sun shines
And then Ma sends Laura and Pa an unprecedented treat: “Nothing was ever so good as that cool wetness going down her throat…Ma had sent them ginger-water. She had sweetened the cool well-water with sugar, flavored it with vinegar, and put in plenty of ginger to warm their stomachs so they could drink it till they were not thirsty.”
But let’s not forget: those times we didn’t want to be her
To start, every time she had to break the ice in the washbasin before she could wash her face.
 When did you wish (or not) you were Laura Ingalls Wilder?