I am often very hard on myself. We’re talking all aspects. Appearance. Finances. Career performance. Housekeeping. Parenting. Paperwork.
However, there is one thing I have done that makes me proud. I’ve read aloud, prolifically, to both my children.
My daughter Savannah, 11, and I have been barreling through the Little House books at a rapid pace. We’re now finishing up “The Long Winter.” It’s time wonderfully spent, learning how Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family survived seemingly insurmountable odds. Anything that is old-fashioned, like Ma’s fearful pronouncement that “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” is time for discussion. Further, this is balanced by Laura’s fascination with Indians and Pa’s insistence that there are good Indians. The family was saved from a massacre by a Nez Perce Indian and from bandits by a “half-breed.” Remember that this was the 1880s.
At one point, one of the characters says he can do what he wants because he is “Free, white and 21.” Earlier, though, in “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” the family–sick to near dying with fever and ague, i.e. malaria–is tended to by a rare black doctor. I
loved the books as a child and still do. They are a record of a frontier child’s personal history. The Ingalls family stands together in the face of locusts, fire, a bout with scarlet fever that leaves the oldest girl, Mary, blind, unimaginable cold and near starvation.
It took a bit but I can say that my daughter, who is currently in the middle of three books, has fallen in love with reading. I realize that despite my reading the Little House on the Prairie books countless times as a kid that I had forgotten many of the particulars. I am also inspired by the family’s fortitude. I am often discouraged by economic issues and even the prospect of cleaning house. These books show me that I can and will prevail.
–Sarah Torribio
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