I would never have thought that the antidote to exams and proposal reading would be juvenile fiction. For the past eight months or so, I’ve been looking up some of the things I read in 4th or 5th grade and sprinkling them in the midst of all the grown-up stuff, which means that I end up reading things like The Wealth of Networks, The Pleasures of the Imagination, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler all at the same time. During a winter lunch of pad thai, Em mentioned her love of The Long Winter, so when I ran across several of the Little House books in a used bookstore they went straight into the stack. She was right — they hold up surprisingly well.

So when Mister Husband spied a sign for the original Little House location just southwest of Independence, Kansas, we stopped. The cabin is a re-creation with an electrical outlet on the back, but it’s still a remarkably stirring location. The descriptions in the book place the site about 40 miles away in Nowata, OK, but evidently all the available data points to this spot 13 miles outside of Independence. All of the topographical features mentioned in the book are indeed there, and census records show the neighbors that became characters lived nearby, including Dr. Tann. The curators say they’re completely positive that the well behind the adjacent later-built farmhouse is the actual well that Pa hand-dug, and that they then tracked down the nearest foundation and rebuilt the cabin there. It’s all enough to make you believe, to stand there imagining the wagons making their way across the plains and the tribes making their forced march in front of the cabin as they were driven from the land. The amount of emotion I felt shocked me.

The women running the center that day were both part-time librarians who are wonderfully devoted to preserving the Laura Ingalls Wilder heritage. One has made it her life’s goal to visit all the graves of the Ingalls and Wilder families, and she showed me her album of the houses and grave sites. One of the best parts of working there, she said, is that nobody who visits is ever in a bad mood. Even if they’re not so invested in the idea of Little House themselves, they have a daughter or wife or sister who is, and whose delight is contagious.

While we were there, a tiny blonde urchin in a pink sundress came tearing around the corner from the well. She grabbed her daddy’s hand and said, gasping, “I know how the well works! I read it in the books!” In the car later, we thought that this is really how history and conservation works. In the end, it doesn’t matter so much if this is the exact precise site, although I really, really want to believe it is. It matters that the place is alive for another eight-year-old girl, and that when she goes home and turns the faucets in her bathroom, she’ll still know how a well works, and how life worked for a little girl on the plains in the late nineteenth century.

(My Little House flickr set is here. Mister Husband's is forthcoming, I think. And the Wikipedia Article on Little House is fascinating.)