The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure Read Free Book Online Page A

Mary pour squiggles and spirals of heated syrup into pans full of snow, which cool into candy. In my childhood imagination I had tended to conflate the hot sugar-and-molasses concoction with maple pancake syrup; I was at least half convinced that I could go outside in the snow with a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s and come back inside with the candy. And I had some idea the end result would be soft like gummi worms and taste like waffles. (Truth be told, I still thought that.)
    Chris deemed the experiment a reasonable success. I wasn’t so sure. When I poured the hot syrup into the pie tins full of snow, I’d tried to make squiggles and spirals but more often than not wound up with blobs and clots.
    â€œI don’t know if you can really call it candy,” I explained to Chris, as he sampled one of the globs. “They’re more like sludge nuggets.”
    â€œThat’s a good name for them,” Chris agreed. They were definitely sweet on first taste, with the distinct tang of the molasses, though after a couple pieces the flavor became sort of cloying. Plus the candy tended to fuse your teeth together, so much so that you had to keep chewing on new pieces in order to disengage your molars, which led to several cycles of sad, desperate mastication.
    After pouring another batch, I began to wonder whether snow was really the best medium for cooling the candy, which constantly threatened to melt into brown, watery puddles. It seemed to cool much more tidily everywhere else it spilled—on the wax paper I’d spread out to hold the finished candy, the counter, the glass lip of the measuring cup.
    â€œSo,” Chris asked, “did you have a Little House true moment here?”
    I looked around. I had a kitchen sink full of brown slush. “I don’t think so,” I said. But I was just getting started.

    When you read biographies of Laura, one of the first things you find out is that the Big Woods weren’t really the uninhabited never-never land the books led you to believe they were.
    In the book Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, John E. Miller points out that the Chippewa River valley region where Laura’s family lived was home to a bustling lumber business district; he cites a local newspaper editorial, written a few years before Laura’s birth, that describes Pepin, the town only a few miles from the Ingallses’ log cabin, as having a “busy hum”: “The air was alive with the sounds and voices of intelligent and independent industry,” the editorial claimed. Miller thinks that was likely an exaggeration, too, but you can’t help but think that even if the industrious hum wasn’t that loud, Pa Ingalls and his family might have been close enough to hear it, so to speak, in between the sounds of the whispering trees and the howling wolves.
    Soon you find out that the Ingalls family didn’t even quite live in the Big Woods proper, that the woods were “just north a ways,” and the area where they lived (the Medium Woods, perhaps?) was at least populated enough to have a schoolhouse within walking distance, and Laura attended the school for a few months when she was four. Pa was even the treasurer of the local school district, so in between making bullets and tanning hides with brains, he must’ve found time every now and then to wipe the bear trap grease from his hands and attend some boring meeting like an 1870s soccer dad.
    Little House in the Big Woods betrays itself a little even within its own pages: you only have to read further along in the book to notice friends and neighbors popping out of the Big Woods woodwork with a little more regularity than those first pages would have you believe. That Swedish woman across the road who gave the Ingalls girls cookies, where did she come from all of a sudden? What about Laura’s little boyfriend, Clarence, who came to visit in his fancy blue suit with gilt buttons and