10 Laura Ingalls Wilder Lessons Helping Me Cope with Coronavirus Quarantine
Our small family is on lockdown until the threat of Coronavirus wanes, as are most families across the country. As stereotypical modern suburbanites, we don’t exactly flex our homemaking skills as part of our daily routine. We cook our own dinner most nights, but we don’t grow our own produce. I tried to grow basil last year, but only because I wanted fresh basil and the store was sold out of all versions except the plant. It leafed for a few months before it gave up. I can serviceably hand-sew, but I’ve never once taken my shiny Singer sewing machine out of the box. I don’t crochet or knit or quilt, and my husband doesn’t tinker or build. We did assemble a gas grill together, though, and managed to not explode.
Laura Ingalls Wilder provided us a window into the life of a white European-descended girl and her family in unfamiliar surroundings, uprooted as much as once a year to new pastures and horizons. Her Little House book series spun yarns of making do as deftly as Ma could knit them. Somewhere in my life, the Little House books transitioned from comfort-food reading to research fodder. I’m relieved to find pearls of wisdom and comfort still exist among the books that I now mine for data and evidence, and amidst the Coronavirus chaos, they still bring comfort.
