Little House on the Prairie

No good choices

~ MaryG ~ 14 Comments
Daily writing prompt
If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?
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When I was growing up in the 70s, there were not many exciting female book characters. There was Pippi Longstocking, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, Heidi, Jo March from Little Women, and the dutiful daughters of The Little House on the Prairie series.

I wasn’t a tomboy like Jo or a sleuth like Nancy, and I didn’t want to be a nurse like Cherry, or be motherless like Pippi or Heidi. And the prairie sisters (though I loved them) had far too many chores.

That leaves all the princesses, witches and bitches, plus the occasional fun nanny, and a fairy or two.

Ugh. No good choices here.

Honestly, maybe Tinkerbell is the best choice. At least she could fly and was a bit naughty – when she wasn’t in her cage.

Book Magic

~ MaryG ~ 3 Comments

What does it mean to be a kid at heart?

As kids, my neighborhood friends and I would play elaborate games of pretend. One game was “Little House on the Prairie,” based on the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We would turn my friend Carolyn’s bed into a pioneer wagon and pretend we were heading west. Calamities would befall us, especially stagecoach robbers. We were always getting attacked.

Here’s a Halloween photo from that time period that I happened to pull out yesterday. I was a cowboy that year. Thinking back, that would certainly fit with my “Little House on the Prairie” obsession.

Halloween, 1973

The magic of books that transported you to a world that you wanted to recreate and inhabit is something that “kid at heart” conjures.

“Little Women” is another book that we liked to act out. We would pretend we were playwrights and write & perform mini-plays.

I remember being so excited when my son built himself a tree perch in which to read “The Swiss Family Robinson.” I knew he was feeling that book magic.

My son reading “The Swiss Family Robinson” in a tree, with the remnants of a brilliant sunset in the background, November 2010