Sometimes you hear a song that you used to listen to as a child and you understand the words for the first time. Sometimes you realize that you understood the song even though some of the words were just sylables. How does that happen?
I listened to Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories of frontier life when I was very small.I can't have been much older than four. Being the second child, I always identified with Laura. I was nothing like her. But we were the right age to be friends in the first book and no matter how far apart we grew after that, I always thought of her as a friend. Images stick in my head from each book. The first one that comes to mind is Laura and Mary playing catch with a pig's bladder. After that there are too many to mention.
I listened to mom read them aloud to Maleny and David recently. I hadn't realized, those books made a much bigger impression on me than merely giving me a picture of life in another time. The famous American spirit - responsible, industrious, careing towards neighbors and, above all, fiercly independant - resonates from those books so strongly, even a young child like me could learn to love those elusive qualities. They don't make Americans like that much anymore. My early understanding of those virtues has its roots in her stories. The roots have certainly grown, but I could still trace their development back to the source.
I listened to the stories and remembered them like the words to a song, and I understood them for the first time, even though their lessons have been with me all along.
2 comments:
I can do that with Little Women. I sometimes think that the books from my childhood had as much to do with my bringing up as my mother did...
An old lady at my church met Laura Ingalls Wilder once. I thought that connection to the past was pretty amazing.
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