Sky Watching

Since the forecast for the next six days includes rain, I’ll have plenty of time to study the shape of raindrops. Hint: the picture to the right is not upside down.

The true shape of rain is just one in a deluge of facts on the subject read for this week’s challenge – a book about nature.

From human migration, to rain in religion, the origin of weather reports and keeping dry, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett includes story after story that will hydrate your small talk for weeks.

It also inspired me to reminisce about my favorite meteorologist and check out a new blog.

And it may even compel me to set aside the books on our next long weekend and make the four-hour drive here to marvel at its fertility rather than grumble at its nuisance. 

Pioneer Girl

 Whichever comes first, the apocalypse or a North Korean missile attack, the first thing that goes into the survival kit is our set of Little House books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. From how to butcher a pig to entertaining one’s children without electricity, the books are quintessentially survival manuals.

In the meantime, I will distract myself from such likelihoods possibilities by checking off the boxes on this year’s Read Harder Challenge. Published posthumously in 2014, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder (edited by Pamela Smith Hill) meets the first challenge.

Ironically, since this year’s challenge is sponsored by Libby (an ereader mascot/app), this hardcover book is the size of a phone book. Well-worth hauling home in person from the library, Wilder’s autobiography is enriched by pages (and pages) of annotations, illustrations, photographs, and maps.

Many of the stories included in Pioneer Girl will be familiar to readers of the Little House series. Written around 1930, the book is a chronicle (originally filling six Big Chief tablets) of Wilder’s life starting from when she was two until she was 18. Even though the stories are familiar, Hill argues that this version provides the reader with access to the “intimate, conversational, and unguarded” perspective of Wilder herself.

However, what I found even more interesting was the introduction – the backstory – of how Wilder came to be the writer we all revere today.  Hill chronicles the writing career (and publishing connections) of Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Since Lane and her parents lived on adjacent properties in the Missouri Ozarks, Lane was able to serve as editor, and critic, for her mother’s writing projects.

With an eye on the marketability of her writing, Lane was accustomed to fictionalizing true stories. Therefore, one version of Pioneer Girl includes an account of the Ingalls’ encounter with a family of mass murderers on the Kansas frontier.  Although such a family existed, they would not have crossed paths with the Ingalls. Despite the embellishments, this version never found a publisher. Instead, Wilder was encouraged to take the stories she wrote for Pioneer Girl and adapt them for a juvenile audience.Thus, the book we know as Little House in the Big Woods was accepted by Knopf in 1931. 

The rest is history. And possibly kindling if necessary. 

“Youth isn't wasted on the young, literature is.”

Quirky literature, perhaps more than most. This past year has been light on quirky reads. I’ve expanded the list to include a few that evoke the peculiar rather than the zany.

Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
“You need a cemetery to go through life.”

Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
“Sometimes just explaining your predicament--to a bartender, a priest, the old woman in a shift and flip-flops cleaning the lint traps in the Laundromat dryers--is all it takes to see a way out of it.”

Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson
“It amazed Izzy the way the children rushed through so many complicated emotions without space between each one. Everything rose so quickly to the surface and then subsided, like firecrackers, and what had originally been so jarring to her, their unguarded emotion, now filled her with great comfort, that anything, no matter what it was, would eventually give way to something else.”

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
“Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?”

The Weight of Feathers by Anna-Marie McLemore
“The sense of falling did not touch her, not as long as her body was between the hands of this boy who felt steadier in the air than on the ground.”