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THE LONG SPRING: What Would Laura Ingalls Wilder Do? (A journal of NYC in the age of Corona)
On March 29th, as I sheltered at home in the East Village, I was overcome by an impulse that made me feel silly, but which I could not resist. I wanted to reread Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, which I’d read over and over as a child. I’d loved them so much that when I was eight, my mother had sewn me a calico dress, matching sunbonnet and white apron. I wore them to third grade; I’d wanted to be Laura. I reread those books hundreds of times in Indiana in the 1970s while reading all the other books on the list my mother made for me — Mark Twain and Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence and Carson McCullers. But whenever I got sick — strep throat, chicken pox, scarlet fever — I would reread the Laura Ingalls books for comfort. I wanted them now, alone in New York; but my old set, yellowed, the paper flaking, were at my parents’ house, in Northern Virginia. I couldn’t get to them, though my parents and brothers, who all live in Virginia now, had pleaded for me to let them drive to Manhattan, rescue me, and take me and my cat to live in Virginia until the coronavirus passed.
But I had said no. The danger was too great that I might infect them, although I showed no symptoms of the virus. You could spread the disease without knowing you had it. My…
