The Little House of Mine

My friend Sarah and I did college online. This gave us the flexibility to do what we were doing that day. What we were doing was walking down a street in Roanoke we did not know. In late noon, in early fall. We did that a lot that semester, crept around places we had never been—outside of Lynchburg, outside our merry-go-round. Walking, I felt bored. I felt fatigued from schoolwork and an itch for solitude. But Roanoke had bookstores, and Sarah and I loved to read. So on that road we found a bookstore, oddly placed and overpriced. I looked in the basket labeled clearance. And in that basket, I found an old friend.

For one evening in the second grade, I was frightfully behind. Our class had moved to the second of the Little House on the Prairie book series. I, fretful as I normally was of teacherly disappointment, remained a few chapters into the first.

So there I sat, pre-wearied of that journey. A few hundred pages was no small feat for a second grader, I knew that. I also knew it would be an additional feat for me.

So there I sat, or sometimes lay—on my back, then belly, then my back again—and the loveseat’s thick threading imprinted me with patterns of flowers. Flowers with vines, jewel-toned and stiff.

But there were moments—between a voluntary pity and involuntary reading pace—where I remember relief. Relief in the story. Deep immersion, refreshing and brief, and unlike anything I’d known.

My dad read to us, of course. Usually in the evenings. Usually important—the Children’s Bible and Greek mythology, illustrated in sherbet colored pencils. He also read Narnia, but it was always out loud, secluded within his voice, and fantasy interested me little. There were also no pictures.

Maybe that’s all it was—imagination and illustrations. For there were pictures in that book. Above the chapter titles and sprinkled throughout. Sketched pictures, if not black and white, a dull tan. They were illustrated like the cover of the first book, and all the others.

But I don’t think it was just that—the pictures. Because, in the midst of my many positions, on that loveseat, I saw the Ingalls girls make sugar snow. Packed snow and drizzled syrup—syrup made from boiling sap. Maple leaf molds too, tin, shiny and golden brown. And winter was made sweet—frostbite and numbed fingers hushed in its new potential. And winter could be enchanted.

I was younger, witnessing my first snow, and it came after tea. Tea with my grandma, a celebration for potty training. I came home, really needing to pee (I had a lot of tea). Finally relieved, I suddenly recognized my brother on the back porch, barehanded as he scooped snow into wrinkles. I walked out jittery, gleeful from my outing and the newness of snow, and laughed with my brother. Then, of course, I made sugar snow.

And on that couch, I also saw a store. Wooden aisles and wooden walls and I smelled living arbor. A gruff clerk and compacted room—warmed in orange lamp light and that which shone through windows. I knew it was both foreign and not to the girls. And I was wonderfully thrilled.

Pa wagered necessities—sugar, coffee, sometimes molasses—while the girls pondered, hard, their choice of candy. There were lemon drops and horehound drops. There was also peppermint. Peppermint was decided upon. A fine choice, I thought. And a chair was pulled, welcoming me to the table of their joy.

There was a tall lamp beside the loveseat. Its hue, nourishing and protective, spread over my pajamas. It spread over the couch and, at adjusted angles, over the pages. But its borders faded in chunks—three or four at a time before reaching the utter dark. The dark, holding all the main floor—the stairwell, the kitchen’s doorway, the piano a table-length away— tight within its slumber.

I had been sitting there for a while, probably since late noon, getting home from my half-day school. Since plopping my backpack on a chair and prolonging my snack. Since dreading and dreading it’s coming. And when it came, and I had tossed and turned, dinner was then ready. I do not remember what I ate, but I'm certain I did. I'm certain because that is what we always did, regardless of what beastly assignment emerged from the day.

Eventually, I must’ve gone to bed. And I do not know what came of that assignment. And I have not read Little House on the Prairie (the first or the others) since. It sits, in its same plainness and modesty, on a bookshelf my brother built last summer.

I plan on reading it. But there's a chance I will not. Regardless, I think it’s all quite enough—lifting it out that clearance bin, flashing its cover to Sarah, my childish stupor, my old friend.

Those patterns tattooed more than skin, for I just can’t seem to shake it—that memory. That stiffness, stiffer against my restlessness. That noon’s descent to dusk, dusk I was not afraid of—secure in lamp light and my new immersion. And I loved that couch, its stiffness and jeweled tones. And I long to see its patterns again.

For at the store I can buy peppermint sticks—root beer or ranch, twelve or twelve dozen. A privilege bringing strange shame—my chair at the Ingalls table strained in the weight. So food tastes the same and stores have no smell—but even still, I look at those stories and I do not flinch. And I don’t think it’s because the genre is not fantasy. And I don’t think it’s because, despite myself, I do love to read. I think it’s because, in witnessing moments of familial love, they were simply added to my own.

For that evening’s book was assigned by the school my dad built. And the lamp beside me, my mother turned on. And I received relief, hearing the other assignments and general noise around that dinner table. And my belly was surely full.

And reading that book, as dark came and came, abundance looked upon its own.