Kathryn Lasky - Searching for Laura Ingalls: A Readers Journal

Text copyright 1993, 2012 by Kathryn Lasky and Meribah Knight

Photographs copyright 1993, 2012 by Christopher G. Knight

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-623342-84-5

Published by StarWalk KidsMedia

Except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles, no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Lasky, Kathryn. Searching for Laura Ingalls : a readers journey / by Kathryn Lasky and Meribah Knight ; photographs by Christopher G. Knight. 1st ed. Summary: A young girls fascination with Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House books leads her family on a trip to see some of the places featured in them.

ISBN 0-02-751666-0 (hc)

1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 18671957Homes and hauntsJuvenile literature.

2. Authors, American20th centuryBiographyJuvenile literature. 3. Frontier and pioneer lifeUnited StatesJuvenile literature. [1. Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 18671957. 2.

Authors, American. 3. Frontier and pioneer life. 4. Voyages and travels.] I. Knight, Meribah. II. Knight, Christopher G., ill. III. Title.

ISBN 0-689-82029-1 (pbk)

For Laura readers everywhere

K.L. and C.G.K.

Contents

O n her fifth birthday there was a box wrapped in blue paper with a silver ribbon. It was heavy, and when she unwrapped it and slid off the close-fitting top, she saw eight books with pale yellow covers all lined up inside. They were called the Little House books and they were all written by the same authorLaura Ingalls Wilder. The books told the true story of her life growing up on the prairie over one hundred years ago.

Meribah Knight was born 115 years after Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura and Meribah never even lived on the planet Earth at the same time. But that didnt matter. It didnt even matter that at five years old Meribah could not really read yet. She still wanted to read the stories of Laura.

The worlds of the two girls could not have been more different. Meribah lived in a city on the East Coast, and during the summer, right around the time of her birthday, her family always went to an island off the coast of Maine.

They began to read the first book that night on the island.

It was a night full of heavy warm air and wild winds. There was talk of a hurricane named Gloria chasing up the eastern seaboard. Meribahs father had gotten out shutters to put over the windows and had dragged the rowboat and the canoe out of the water and into a shed. But Meribah and her mom sat on the couch reading about Laura Ingalls, who was just a year younger at that time than Meribah and who was living in a little house in the big woods of Wisconsin.

The gale winds outside the shingled island house suddenly became the howling of the wolves at night in the big woods. Meribah wished that, like Laura, she had a trundle bed that slid out from under her parents big bed, where she could stay safe and cozy from the wolves or the hurricane or whatever screamed in the night. She yawned.

Time for bed? Her mother asked.

No! One more chapter. So her mother read onabout how Lauras pa shot the bear that stole the pig, about churning butter and baking bread, about making candy from molasses on pans full of snow, about Pa playing his fiddle, and about the lonesome moan of the wind through the immense woods of Wisconsin.

And then the island house lights blew out, and Meribah helped her mom light the candles and the kerosene lamp they had ready. Meribahs father, who was listening to the marine weather forecast on his portable radio, said, Shes thirty miles off Point Judith. He was talking about the hurricane named Gloria, and not wolves in the big woods.

Is that far from here? Meribah asked.

Well, not when shes coming at thirty-five miles an hour, but she could veer and spin off to sea. Dont worry, were safe. And Meribah half expected her dad to call her Flutterbudget just the way Pa had called Laura. Time to go to bed, though. Cant read with the lights out.

How about kerosene lamps? Thats how Lauras mom read to her. One more chapter, please!

That night when they finally went to bed, Meribahs parents let her sleep at the foot of their bed in a sleeping bag. She was thinking about the wolf voices in the wind and what it would be like to try to cuddle a corncob doll like the one that Laura had. And she was wondering if there was still such a big woods. Her mom said that Laura was real. She was certainly the most real person Meribah had ever met up with in a book. But it was hard to imagine a woods so big that you traveled for a day, or a week, or a whole month, and there was still nothing but woods. That was what Laura Ingalls Wilder had written on the very first page of the first book.

How far, Mom, Meribah asked, would you have to go to find the big woods today? But she could tell from their breathing that both her parents were sound asleep.

The wind rattled their house until Meribah thought every shingle would fall off, but Gloria never came. The hurricane spun inland near Portland after knocking some boats around and tearing up some trees. By the time the weather people were talking about the next hurricaneHerbieMeribah and her mom had finished Little House in the Big Woods and were halfway through Little House on the Prairie.

I t is way past her bedtime, but Meribah is still up. Her light is off, but her flashlight is on under the covers. She is rereading her favorite part of These Happy Golden Years, the eighth and last of the Little House books, the one in which Laura gets married. Its the part just before her wedding, when Pa brings her a trunk to pack up her things for her new life with Almanzo. This is a happy-sad book. Meribah loves the part where Almanzo and Laura go buggy riding around a lake, and when they fall in love and when he asks her to marry him. But the leaving home part is so hard, especially when on the day before her wedding she sits on the doorstep and listens to Pa play the fiddle for the last time. Meribah reaches for her diary. It is so bright outside with the full moon and all the snow that she hardly needs the flashlight. There is a very bright streetlight just outside her window. So she creeps over to the window seat and opens the shutters.

This is the diary her mom bought her for their trip this summer. They are going to go to the prairie to see the places where Laura really lived. Her mom says they are still there, just different. There is still a Plum Creek, and there is a place called Pepin where the big woods were, and the little town on the prairie called De Smet is still there. They will even go look for Silver Lake. They will go in exactly 122 days, and she will take this diary and write all about it. She cant wait to start, so she starts the story now, this very minute, on a creaking cold night in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the streetlights and moonlight turning her page bright. She is just learning how to write cursive. She should use cursive in her diary, she decides. It feels more important to write something in cursive.