Hello, my name is Whitney and I have a secret obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder (and, consequently, pioneers). OK, so maybe it’s not so much of a secret anymore, but I do still love her. Today, she would have been 145 years old, and she has left so much of a legacy.
Little House In The Big Woods is the first book I remember reading myself. I went to Laura Ingalls Wilder Elementary School, where it was required reading, but I read it on my own and fell in love with the series. I still love to reread the books, though it is interesting how my perspective has changed as I've gotten older. My favorite book has changed, from By The Shores Of Silver Lake to These Happy Golden Years, and I see Laura as a different person. Even though so many of the books are about her childhood experiences, it is the adult Laura, who we see in the last books, who I relate to the most. She is strong, independent, and hardworking, and I think her thoughts on growing up are universal, still to this day.
I think my perspective has also changed since visiting De Smet, South Dakota, the "settling down" point of the Ingalls family and the place where Laura and Almanzo first settled. Nathan and I went a couple of years ago, and it was so much different than I had ever pictured in my head. While I always knew she was a real person, walking around the surveyor's house, seeing the Ingalls homesead (which now houses what I like to call the Laura Ingalls Wilder Amusement Park museum), and seeing the Wilder's homesead, made her that much more real. And different, too, because all of these things I imagined seemed so different and real.
Laura definitely made me into a reader, which I will always be grateful for.
Little House In The Big Woods is the first book I remember reading myself. I went to Laura Ingalls Wilder Elementary School, where it was required reading, but I read it on my own and fell in love with the series. I still love to reread the books, though it is interesting how my perspective has changed as I've gotten older. My favorite book has changed, from By The Shores Of Silver Lake to These Happy Golden Years, and I see Laura as a different person. Even though so many of the books are about her childhood experiences, it is the adult Laura, who we see in the last books, who I relate to the most. She is strong, independent, and hardworking, and I think her thoughts on growing up are universal, still to this day.
I think my perspective has also changed since visiting De Smet, South Dakota, the "settling down" point of the Ingalls family and the place where Laura and Almanzo first settled. Nathan and I went a couple of years ago, and it was so much different than I had ever pictured in my head. While I always knew she was a real person, walking around the surveyor's house, seeing the Ingalls homesead (which now houses what I like to call the Laura Ingalls Wilder Amusement Park museum), and seeing the Wilder's homesead, made her that much more real. And different, too, because all of these things I imagined seemed so different and real.
Laura definitely made me into a reader, which I will always be grateful for.
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