Now the sun and the wind were hotter and Laura’s legs quivered while she made them trample the hay….She was thirsty, then she was thirstier, and then she was so thirsty that she could think of nothing else. Nothing was ever so good as that cool wetness going down her throat. Ma had sent them ginger-water. —The Long WinterBefore our...
Mary was braiding a new rug. She had cut worn-out woolen clothes in strips, and Ma had put each color in a separate box. Mary kept the boxes in order and remembered where each color was. She was braiding the rag-strips together in a long braid that coiled down in a pile beside her chair. —The Long WinterOn the prairie, no scrap of...
As a child who’d practically memorized the Little House book series, I was entranced by the idea of Laura Ingalls Wilder as an “untutored housewife,” whose fiction suddenly sprang to life fully formed when she was in her sixties. As an adult, I learned that the widespread notion that Wilder was a self-taught genius with no training as a...
When Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the final scene in her last Little House book for young readers, she gave the closing lines to Pa’s fiddle and its music. Laura and Almanzo’s wedding day has come to a close and the young couple sits on the doorstep of their own little house. In her memory, Laura hears “the voice of Pa’s fiddle and the...
The following is an interview with Barbara Mayes Boustead, a forecast meteorologist and climate program manager at the National Weather Service office in Omaha/Valley, Nebraska. She's also the co-chair of “LauraPalooza 2015: Through Laura’s Eyes”. Q: Tell us about your background in meteorology and what your study focus has been? I have...