"The Long Winter"

The kids and I are reading our way through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.

Last fall, I began reading "Little House in the Big Woods" to my 9- and 7-year olds, and I noticed that soon the older girls were drifting in to the living room to listen while they worked on other things. Wonderful!

So we continued, through "Little House on the Prairie", "On the Banks of Plum Creek", "Farmer Boy", and "By the Shores of Silver Lake".

We've gotten through the delightful early years (I get as sentimental for Laura's early childhood as I do for my own kids'... almost, anyway... so I love reading "Big Woods"), and the difficult years on the prairie with the plague of locusts, fires, and drought. We noted the great contrast between the utter poverty of Laura's family -- the threadbare clothes, lack of shoes, and scarcity of most foods -- and the luxury in all those areas available to Almanzo as a boy living with his well-to-do parents back East.

We choked back tears (well, I did) when we learned of Mary's blindness and the death of Jack the brindle bulldog in the opening of "By the Shores of Silver Lake". It doesn't matter that I've read these books a dozen times before; I still am moved by so many of the passages.

Now we've started "The Long Winter". It's too bad that we didn't get to this book last month, when we had snow and wind and cold. But, no matter; the weather is still chilly enough this week to match the falling temps in the book. And even if it wasn't, Laura's writing is so vivid that we would shiver while reading it on a 90 degree July day.