Watch Johnson talk about the lapdesk in Sarah’s video.

Incidentally, a replica just like this one was offered for sale at LauraPalooza 2010. It sold immediately.

As I started out from Mankato, I couldn’t help but notice the temps were way below zero. And I decided it would be fun to keep a log of my trip, following the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway east toward her roots, to those of her parents, in the spirit of On the Way Home.

At each stop along the way–and never while I was actually driving–I sent a text message to update my Facebook status. I noted where I was, what I was up to, and the temperature. It stayed below zero until I got into Wisconsin; by the time I was in Wisconsin Dells–stopping at Exit 92 for a Dunkin’ Donut and cup of coffee–it was well above zero. And I realized I had another Laura opportunity: I could stop in Concord, armed with new general directions for finding the original farms of Charlotte Quiner Holbrook and Lansford P. Ingalls.

I’ve been to Concord before. At one point, I lived in Milwaukee for three years, and I took advantage of that opportunity to seek out these roots of Caroline and Charles. But at LauraPalooza last summer, in talks with John Bass, I got more specific directions to the original farms. I decided to go off the freeway at County Road F and drive out that direction.

The problem, however, was that I couldn’t be sure I was in the right space. Some of these sites felt familiar–the Groose area, for example, rang a dim bell–but because this was an impulse stop, I wasn’t armed with the right maps to make sure I was in the right spot. Naturally, I sent a text message to Facebook noting my dilemma, as part of the log, before moving on.

And got a wonderful lesson in the power of the social network and the generosity of the Laura community.

Nansie Cleaveland, who is a dedicated Wilder researcher, happened to note my problem, and she had the maps! She scanned them and posted links to them for me on Facebook. I retrieved the maps on my phone, and on the way back from Milwaukee, easily found the right spot. (Nansie since has written post of her own about this experience, and included those links for anybody else wandering through Concord at her blog, Pioneer Girl.)

My problem had been that I was looking for the farms south of the Oconomowac River, and south and east of Concord. The farms are actually north and east of Concord. They adjoin at a specific spot:

The spot where the Lansford Ingalls and Charlotte Holbrook lands adjoin.

Parked on that corner, I took pictures to the north and east of the intersection.

The Lansford Ingalls farm.

This sweeping cornfield, with the farmhouse just up the street, was original Lansford P. Ingalls land–where Charles spent most of a his youth.

It’s easy to see, with as close as the two farms were, how three different couples evolved from the numerous young people who lived there. Henry Quiner and Polly Ingalls, Eliza Quiner and Peter Ingalls, and Caroline Quiner and Charles Ingalls all married.

The Quiner/Holbrook land lays kitty-corner across the street from this intersection. This is the sweep of field and stream that exists there now:

The Holbrook farm land.

I just barely missed shooting an image of my vehicle in the foreground of this one.

If the farmhouses were located in roughly the same spots as they are today, the young people living on these farms only had to walk about a half a mile to go visiting. There would have been many more trees than exist today; the farm land has been cleared and planted, and these farms look to be successful and self-supporting.

As we drive down the road south, with the Holbrook farm on the right, a delightful surprise awaits:  When we approach the river, which apparently once wandered through the Holbrook land, several houses have sprung up on the right, a mini-village of sorts. The entire site is still in the Town of Concord, but one would have to cross the river–and today, Interstate 94–to get to the village crossroads.

Much easier, today, is to turn right at the river, and go to Concord General Store just off the freeway for gas and an ice cream cone or coffee. Even if the owners didn’t know, when I asked, that they were just down the road from Little House history.

In her childhood, the Wilder family was desperately poor. It’s one of the facts about the Ingalls and Wilder experiences we don’t dwell on much, but it’s clear from the historical record and from their writings that they did not have much money or property, and that at times, even daily food was a struggle–and not just during the hard winter.

Today, we know more about the effects of desperate poverty on the cognitive and emotional development of children who face such poverty in their childhoods. Many of these children struggle in school, missing days or weeks at a time. Early nutritional deficiencies lead to problems with brain, bone and muscle development, and vitamin D deficiency–a current problem in the news–leads to biochemical problems including depression. Physically, cognitively, and emotionally, early childhood poverty takes its toll.

Rose would have felt the burden she seemed to be to her parents at an early age. In The First Four Years, Laura writes that a “Rose in December was more rare than a rose in June, and must be paid for accordingly.” As much as Laura dwells on finances in that book, it seems clear that the couple struggled significantly, and that money worried Laura deeply. Children aren’t stupid; they pick up on these things, and certainly, Rose did, too.

In On the Way Home, Rose writes in the setting that she felt humiliated by her mother’s need to protect her–a big girl, going on eight years old. I re-read that this morning, in the wake of a visit from my own eight-year-old niece, and marveled that Rose could think anyone would leave a young seven-year-old girl alone to play, unsupervised, in an unfamiliar setting. It led me to think about another factor in her development: birth order.

As an oldest-and-only child, research tells us that Rose likely would have been a type-A personality, forced to be independent at an early age, and forced, too, to act more maturely than her brain was ready for. As much as we note Rose’s intelligence and precociousness, we need to understand that her circumstances forced her to grow up earlier than she’d have liked.

So how did this play out? Why is this important?

Because as a young adult, Rose acted out against the restraints of her upbringing, and became a bit of a wild child, indulging her every whim, spending freely, traveling where the wind took her, and living life to the fullest. She married a kindred spirit in this regard, but divorced him when she realized she couldn’t depend on him.

Rose had discovered she could only depend on herself.

And we know where that discovery led her.

I like you. In many ways, I think you’re fabulous. You’re so much fun to be around—a tremendous storyteller, always good for a joke (and not always a clean one!). I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone with such a delightful combination of worldliness and down-home simplicity. And I’m so impressed with everything you’ve accomplished in your life … your writings, your travels, your caretaking (though the Turner boys …well, all’s well that ends well I suppose), and most importantly your maintenance of spirit. People only think they have convictions until they meet Rose Wilder Lane.

But that book? On the Way Home? Published after your mother’s death? I have only one question.

What were you thinking?

Don’t misunderstand me. I think it was lovely that you decided to publish this very early writing of your mother’s. What a wonderful piece of history to have, a record of her family’s final move, the journey across the Midwest to the place they’d live the rest of their lives. And yes, it was thoughtful of you to bookend the journal with settings beginning in De Smet and ending in Mansfield.

But I repeat: what were you thinking?

Really, the beginning is all right, though it gives me a strange feeling to read your reaction to your mother’s attempt at brightening a dreary situation when she said living in the big house in De Smet was like camping. She was just a mother trying to make sure her daughter didn’t worry, wasn’t she? Not to mention the way you talked about her and your father’s diff-theer-i-a. Not that your phrasing wouldn’t fit in perfectly in a piece of fiction. Your observations were always so severely pointed. But it was the wrong place, I think.

Still, neither of those issues is so important in the grand scheme.

I’m really talking about the ending. Rose, I don’t get it. You spend more than half the amount of pages as your mother’s entire record on your epilogue. This is useful, of course—how nice to have your mother’s story put in context. And some of it I dearly love. Such a way with words you have. Your description of your mother’s preparation to head to the bank to sign the papers buying the piece of land she and your father finally found in Mansfield is exquisite, and so exciting to a Little House reader: putting on her black wedding dress, brushing and plaiting her beautiful long hair that extended to her heels, fluffing her bangs, whistling “Oh Susanna,” perching her black sailor hat atop her head.

But putting things in context isn’t all you do. Essentially, you use these pages to tell your own stories.

The first story is about your parents’ missing $100 bill. It’s all the money they have in the world, and they were going to use it as a deposit on the land they found. And it’s misplaced. Your parents are understandably upset. This is what you write:

Suddenly [Laura] thought, hoped, asked, Had I taken it myself, to play with?

NO! I felt scalded. She asked, Was I sure? I hadn’t just opened the desk sometime, for fun? My throat swelled shut; I shook my head, no. “Don’t cry,” she said automatically. I wouldn’t cry, I never cried, I was angry, insulted, miserable, I was not a baby who’d play with money or open that desk for fun, I was going on eight years old. I was little, alone, and scared. My father and mother sat there, still. In the long stillness I sank slowly into nothing but terror, pure terror without cause or object, a nightmare terror.

I’m not saying what you wrote isn’t true. You were there; you know what happened. (Or at least you know what you remember.) You just seemed to make some interesting choices. I can’t quite figure out why you said what you did—and left out what you left out.

Later on, you detail how your father cuts a slab of salt pork to give to a needy man with a hungry family, and you quote your mother crying out at the gesture: “Manly, no! We’ve got Rose.” “He paid no attention,” you write.

While the reader is still left wondering why you included this information about your father, making us think, well, not very highly of him, you move on. Even though the money is thankfully found and the land purchased, your family is still destitute so your father tries to sell some lumber he has cut. He comes home, finally, very late on the day he went out to sell it. He’s exhausted, and you meet him at the wagon and find out he sold it. You run in to tell your mother (whom you say “snaps” at you that of course she’s glad! when you ask her, isn’t she glad?) and then run out again to your father.

I pranced out, to tell my father how glad she was. And he said, with a sound of crying in his voice, “Oh, why did you tell her? I wanted to surprise her.”

You say such things, little things, horrible, cruel, without thinking, not meaning to. You have done it; nothing can undo it. This is a thing you can never forget.

Rose. Why? Why on earth would you include such words about your parents who have passed away? Why do you have the desire to tarnish them both in print through the eyes of a seven-year-old? Particularly your mother, who is loved and cherished the world over as the little girl who grew up on the prairie. Are you really that bitter in your 70s? About something that happened over half a century ago?

And why do it in her book? It’s almost like you were capitalizing on the wide audience of Little House readers to present your mother not as Laura, but as the person you saw and wanted everyone else to see, the person you didn’t always agree with, who wasn’t always “Laura Ingalls,” the Little House character. But in what was essentially a companion Little House book, all I was left with was an overwhelming sense of disrespect.

I can’t help but wonder: What good did writing that do you? Moreover, what good did publishing it do? It seems to me you had a chip on your shoulder that you could never quite get rid of. Your portrayal of your parents feels like … well, it feels like payback.

Payback for what, I couldn’t say.

But you do write so well, Rose. In a manner completely different from your mother. You truly were one of the country’s great writers of the 20th century. No one can ever take that away from you, not even the angelic legacy of your mother.

Sincerely,
A fan, reader, and friend

I already had read every one of Laura’s books I could find, and had begged for copies for my birthdays, Christmas, and any other occasion I could think of. But I still held out hope that there would be just one more book. Maybe two. Or three. But just one more?

On this day, visiting my cousins in Madison, Wis., I had just learned about the bookmobile, and how it visited the suburban neighborhoods to make it easier for kids to get their hands on new books. I ran down to the street with Nicole, Sara, and Tracy–my sister-cousins and my sister–to see what the bookmobile lady had in her truck.

There she was: “my” Laura, along with most of her books. No Plum Creek this time. But, wait: what’s this?

“On the Way Home”?

I squealed out loud. My Aunt Bonnie, who’d come down to the curb behind us, said, “Did you find something, Amy?”

“I haven’t ever, ever read this one!”

Because I didn’t live in Madison, I didn’t have a library card. Aunt Bonnie must have checked it out for me, because I was allowed to take the book into the house, immediately sitting down and cracking open the cover.

Rose spoke to me about the trip from De Smet to Missouri, about those days in the wagon, and the heat, and the dust, and the panic. She set the scene brilliantly, and then, Laura spoke to me from the pages. She had a different voice than I was used to. It seemed much more adult, much more like my mom’s or my aunts’, but it was unquestionably hers.

I read it straight through for the rest of the visit, withdrawn from the family’s play, knowing that I would have to leave the book behind when we left.  But the thrill I felt then remains the thrill I feel now when I see something new, something I don’t have, something that Laura or Rose knew and loved and shared.

Can there be just one more?