Prairie Adventure: the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Unassuming.

A small cabin in a big woods.

1867.

A little girl born in a gray log house.

Laura Ingalls.

And her voice and her story and her charming way with words have traveled across the years and the valleys to speak into my own childhood and into the childhood in which my children are living right now.

Seven miles outside of tiny Pepin, Wisconsin.

Once the big woods where Laura and Mary tossed the pig bladder like a balloon, now picturesque farm land with fields of corn in the shadow of the low bluffs.

Oh you guys.

It was so simple and sweet.

No tourist trap. A sign so tiny you wouldn’t notice it.

A replica cabin on the genuine land that once belonged to Pa and Ma Ingalls.

It was just what I wanted it to be.

And we pulled out the blankets and we sat under the shade of several generous trees with the breeze blowing and I read Laura’s words out loud.

Both the beginning and the ending paragraphs of Little House in the Big Woods.

(Yes. I made room in the crowded space-inadequate Tahoe for the entire blue-covered series of the Little House books. It makes me hurt a little to think how much my momma would have loved to know that our beloved volume of books was making this trek with us.)

We talked about scenes that happened right in the yard where we were reading and drawing and listening. Ma patting a giant bear when she thought it was a cow. Their cat – Black Susan – living with them. The Christmas when Laura received her precious rag doll Charlotte.

We gathered our sample of dirt from Laura’s birthplace and tucked it away in our quickly filling up treasure box.

It was charming.

Quaint. Off the beaten path.

Sort of a leftover and a tad forgotten feeling hanging about the place.

Which made it all the more appealing to me – a fan of forgotten days and past lives.

If I could throw my arms around a little spot of earth and hug it – that’s what I’d want to do to Laura’s little house in the big woods.