Posts Tagged ‘Fort Worth Mom Blog’

I think I’ve done everything I can to get ready — lesson plans are in the bag, and the prep work is done. I’ve created an activity for social studies where the kids make, in four separate quarters, our Texas map, then we tape it all together for display. I’m kind of excited about this but also worried it won’t work.  Another thing — Southwestern Texas doesn’t have as many map details as the rest of the quarters. But perhaps we will include a few details from Mexico in that portion.

Dean told me I should not be so worried about my first day, because the real “first” time you teach is the first time you stood in front of a class. It’s true, I was a substitute teacher.

But tonight, I feel as if I’m in the calm before the storm. I’m not cooking dinner, someone else was recruited for that, so I’m just blogging and listening to the kids play video games. I’ve got my roll sheet and my policies and procedures, and if my classroom looks rather bare compared to the rooms of the teachers who’ve been there a while, nevertheless, it does look ready, with stacks of books on the desks, an icebreaker activity waiting for the kids, and the seats and lockers assigned in four table groups — the reds, greens, blues and yellows. Tomorrow, they will make up their own names for their tables and chose a leader for each workgroup. But tonight, I will not think about these things. I will enjoy myself, watching another Bollywood movie from Netflix with Dean, and just assume everything will be okay. Because whether it is or it isn’t, there’s not much I can do about the outcome for the next 12 hours, except wait and see what it is.

Yesterday, today and tomorrow is the annual Sales Tax Holiday. There will be no sales tax (of 8.25%) on the following items:

• Clothing and footwear under $100
• Backpacks under $100 for elementary and secondary students
• Schools supplies including paper, binders, crayons, lunch boxes, etc.
• Includes layaway items

I was not able to put off shopping for all the kids until this weekend. I already bought (with a little help from my friend, my mother) all the school supplies, and all the clothes. All that remains is the annual Famous Footwear trip. This Famous Footwear trip alone can be almost as much as the rest of the clothes and supplies.

What do we buy? Nikes, Sketchers, Aasics, Adidas, Converses, maybe a pair of Pumas or New Balances, plus a pair or two of work shoes for the adults. How much do we hope to save? Well, it’s buy one get one for half price, resulting in an overall reduction of 20% or so (because they take the half off the cheaper pair.) Then we’ve got a 20% off coupon, now we’re at 40% Then the sales tax for another 8.25% reduction. Overall if we do it just right,  it will work out to a reduction of almost half the price of the shoes.

I’m not convinced, I must admit to you, that the shoes haven’t been marked up 2-300% to prepare for my clever bargaining. Since when did it cost $80 to put together a pair of mid-range Nikes in a third-world country where workers make just fifty cents a day? Nevertheless, we live in this society, so the annual family “shoe binge” is inevitable. My kids are Americans, they need their athletic shoes. The choices they make will tell everyone, the first day of school, who they are, even if there are five other kids in their grade with the exact same shoes.

Our local Famous Footwear store is in the mile-long strip mall with OfficeDepot, PetCo, HomeDepot and TJMax just north of the intersection of the 820 and Hulen Blvd. If you go there this afternoon you might see us. We’ll be the family with the 6 foot tall son who claims he needs a pair of $100 shoes because there are no other shoes in the store that are “right.” He is like a Gila Monster — once he gets ahold of his prey he will let go. His parents can either buy the shoes or leave him in the store forever.

For a detailed description of the sales tax holiday rules, see Window on Texas Government, 2009 Sales Tax Holiday.

August 17th was our first day of “real” work at my school. We opened up with a meeting of all the teachers and then it was off to the classrooms to work on getting set up.

My situation, as a brand new teacher, was somewhat unique. Everyone else was trying to get all their teaching tools put away, while I was trying to figure out how to set up my room, make a few posters, cover the bulletin boards, and get my class list. My class was empty. I had no last year’s teaching tools to put away.

I felt helpless. Fortunately for me one of the other teachers came to my room, knowing I was new, and announced that she had a huge box of borders which had been left with her by a retiring teaching last spring. I looked through them. I found some borders decorated with globes, some with rainbow pencils, and some with apples and “welcome” spelled out. I could put colored butcher paper over the bulletin boards (a technique I learned from observing the classroom next door) then staple the borders around for an attractive display. I would have two subject-specific word walls and one large bulletin board for student work.

The colored butcher paper comes on huge rolls, like the rolls you see upholstery fabric on, and although there is a mechanism for tearing the paper off, it doesn’t work properly. So, as for the first time ever I tried to tear the roll away, it ripped. It was uneven. I felt foolish.  But I got a large piece of paper and carried it down the hallway.

“That paper looks pretty raggedy,” another teacher teased  me.

“This is just my practice run,” I told him. And in fact, it was. Hanging the paper, I had to learn to use the straight edge along the top, staple it in place, then let the paper hang down the bulletin board, staple that down the sides, work down to the bottom, staple it all, then go around the bulletin board with open scissors like an exacto knife and take off the excess.  When I was done, it was too messy, the paper hadn’t been big enough, I had to do it again.

If I can’t even put up a bulletin board, how am I ever going to teach my class, I wondered as I walked down to get more butcher paper. And will anyone notice that I wasted a whole bunch of paper?

No one noticed. The second time I brought three sheets of paper for the three boards and this time it went much better. I learned you can patch a corner that’s too short by slipping another same-colored piece under it and stapling — you can’t really see the rip. Then once the paper is up, you staple the borders around the edges. I broke a lot of staples doing that because the wood was pretty hard. I got it done. My bulletin boards looked great.

This was only one small battle, of course. I hadn’t yet made the posters, I hadn’t brought the plants I bought in yet, or the notebooks, and it still looked pretty bare. But they told me  my computer would be coming in today. And the posters are almost ready. And I keep telling myself over and over, with all the teachers in this world, all of them who had a first year and a first day in front of their own first class, and who made it, why should I be any different?

I feel like I’m at the edge of a tremendous sea, in a tiny boat, getting ready to embark. That’s an uneasy feeling, but it’s not necessarily a bad one. A lot could happen, and surely will.

Yesterday I allowed myself (on FaceBook, of all places) to get sucked into a political discussion of the president’s healthcare efforts. Because this is a non-political site (honest) I’m not going to discuss the particulars, but basically I spent much of the morning in rather heated conversation, at the end of which I felt misunderstood, defeated, and angry. There’s no talking politics with someone who disagrees with you these days.

Why does this concern me? Because I believe we’ve become prey to a certain hardening of our belief systems and an unwillingness to question our own thinking. The country has polarized into “hard right” and “hard left” and there’s no middle ground. The worst part of the matter is the packaging of ideas — if you’re for the initiatives of one side or the other, you’re for ALL of their initiatives. You won’t need to think for yourself; all you need to do is follow the leadership and yell loudest.

I was first concerned about this type of rhetoric during the Bush administration, when I felt many of the president’s opponents were shrill and hysterical. I remember  one evening when my husband told a member of the extended family “Bush is not the antichrist” and the response was to argue. I believed this type of partisan hard-lining was the province of only one party.

But I was so wrong. My son came home from a friend’s house the other day and told me, “Basically, they’re pretty sure Obama is the devil.”

At that point I had to accept: it wasn’t about a particular political party, this was the rhetoric we have come to use, and the hard-lining Americans have come to believe in. No, Bush is not the antichrist, Obama is not the devil, they are human beings. In the old days the POTUS used to get a certain measure of respect along with the office. No more.

How did this happen? I’m not sure but my husband and I just finished a book on tape by Neil Postman called Amusing ourselves to Death. In this work, back in the 80′s, the author argued that the television was effecting the way we thought and perhaps most troublingly the way we saw politics, inculcating a rhetoric where instead of discussing problems we simply called names and reviled. In the twenty-five intervening years since the book came out, political rhetoric has apparently continued going in the same direction. Our nation has slipped into being the kind of place where we can’t have a civil conversation about decisions that need to be made, instead we get angry.

Why is this a problem? Because while the man on the street shouts incoherent insults, big corporations are influencing, even controlling, the decisions in this country, such as bailouts and healthcare, in their own favor. They don’t want  everyday people to be able to discuss and negotiate; they want their lobbyists to be the only people doing that.

What hope is there for this situation? Well, blogs for one thing, where we can talk more openly about problems that face us, perhaps first on a small scale (we need more and better public pools in Fort Worth, as you remember) and then growing to bigger issues. I’m hoping blogs are the antidote to the television-drenched view of reality that has polarized us into “us” and “them.” This may be an overly optimistic view, but I’ve always been an optimist.

I guess maybe FaceBook isn’t the place to talk politics. But do patronize your local blog and discus things civilly. And do consider, before you demonize the opposition, that when you do that they are going to fire right back with the same. Ultimately, I think we need negotiation, not confrontation.

Back in the day, you could say anything on your blog, in a chat room, or where ever on the web and it wouldn’t matter because you were the only person you knew who had “internets” or whatever they called this thing. In 1998 I was the first one to have email in my family. Actually, it was my husband, who got it in a package along with grad school and kindly let me share his account. Eventually, I got my own account … a Netscape  one … yeah, it was a while ago. I had a website where I published articles which virtually no one ever read but the good part was I could say whatever I wanted without fear of reprecussions.

That was then. Now, there’s no privacy on the web anymore. Now, everytime I turn around someone is asking to add me on FaceBook or following my Twitter stream and with about 2000 unique visitors a month here at this site, there’s no way of knowing which of my arch-enemies are reading this and making notes of my typos.

Back then, I could shoot off my mouth at will, on a website, blog, or any portion of cyberspace, and never worry that someone from my family or from work, or from anywhere, really, was going to read what I wrote and, more importantly, associate my virtual web words with a real flesh and blood person, me, who was sitting across from them at an actual wood table. I could complain about anyone, anything, anywhere, and it would never get back to anybody. The web was my virtual confessional.

Eventually, my parents got on the web and my dad started reading my blog, but since I didn’t have any fights with him at the time that didn’t matter. Now, however, it’s pretty safe to say that everyone is on the web, with the exception of those too young to read, and, overall, you are never safe complaining about some member of the immediate or extended family, friends, or people at work, and feeling safe that they won’t find out. Probably they will. They follow you on FaceBook, they get your Twitter updates.

I heard that my ex-husband’s wife followed my blog and my twitter account, but that was okay … whatever she found there, she probably didn’t like me anyway, deep down, so what did I care? But the gig was finally up when I put a rant on my old blog, The Kids are All Right, about a member of the extended family — and she read it. The next time I was over at her house, huge innuendos were dropped like size 12 shoes about my blog, and how many people read it, and various other allusions to what I’d written.

Drat, I thought, I can no longer vent on the web. Mea Culpa. As I said, the web is not a safe place.

You heard it here first.  Writing “Uncle George has really really ugly green golf pants that make me want to throw up” will seriously put you at risk for, next time you see Uncle G., him asking, “don’t like my golf pants?”

I’ve thought of changing my avatar, my alias, my byline — but it’s too late. Everyone knows where I am and I’ve worked for almost a year building up the name recognition, etc. for this site and I’m not going to do it again. I’m going to have to do this the old fashioned way from here on out, and watch what I say.

I’m sorry people, but the days of digital freedom are over.

In the spring and summer months, carnivals sometimes set up in shopping centers in various zones in the city. This latter-day descendant of the Travelling Circus or camp meeting draws attention with its towering ferris wheel and, at night, bright lights. The other day we drove past one in the Ridgelea Mall Parking lot, and the kids insisted on checking it out. “I’m not taking you now,” I said, “but we can find out how long they’ll be here.”

It turned out to be opening at 6 p.m. through tonight, Sunday. The kids asked if we could come back. I thought it over and decided we could, on Saturday. I thought they might forget and I would be off the hook, but by no means. They counted off the days. “We’re going to the carnival in three days … two days … one and a half days … tonight.”

By the time we got dinner finished and the dishes washed, it was 9:30. For normal activities, this would be a problem, but the carnival is open ’till at least midnight, we could still go at this late hour, as long as the kids were still awake … and believe me they were.

We arrived in the sea of lights at just 10 p.m. The ferris wheel was spinning, the Kamakaze was spinning cars of people upside down, the flags on its crown pointing down as the cars on the bottom flew up, the Scrambler was scrambling, loud rock music blared, carnival barkers tried to get our attention for the games of chance and skill. The spectacle of it all was intense as we walked the circle of attractions and checked out the Space Ship 2000, the Haunted House, the Hall of Mirrors … the kids drank it in, skipping along.

Rides were not cheap, ranging from 3 to 5 tickets (24 tickets for $20). Angelo first tried the mini trains (evidently going on the TRE the day before did not satiate his train fixation) and Brand and Joanna went on the Space Ship, which is a sort of human centrefuge which gets people dizzy so they stumble as they get off.

Screaming, lights, loud music, the smell of fried and sugared food — we don’t do this every day, but when we do, it’s such a thrill. You can see why the kids wouldn’t forget to remind me to come out here.

I chose only one ride — my old favorite, the Scrambler. I got on and it spun around and around and I laughed and laughed. It reminds me of riding a running horse, actually, that rushing rhythm is like a gallop to me. It’s delicious, really, there’s no other way to explain it.

At the end of the evening (which due to the shortness of funds lasts only about an hour) Brand and Joanna flipped a coin for the last extra ticket, Brand so he could ride the Kamakaze and Jo so she could ride the Ferris Wheel. Brand won, and Jo cried. He considered giving her the ticket, but decided going on the ride is too important. He walked up the ramp, and was strapped into the cage behind four giggling teenage girls in tank tops just a couple years older than him. He held on. The cages began to swing back and forth, rising higher and higher until they hovered upside down and then came flying back to earth. I watched, heart in my throat. What else could I do? When he got off, he was all smiles. He made it. He would not, probably, analogize the experience with riding a running horse, something which he has never done, but he knows it was something transcendent.

When we leave, Angelo cries, partly because he doesn’t want to leave and partly because it’s 11 o’clock and far past his bedtime. We should all be at home now. The music blares and the rides hum in the background as we walk back into the night. I reflect that the carnival was worth it, at least once a year, for that moment of some kind of magic within a mundane summer.

The kids pose by the TRE train outside Dallas Union Station

My youngest son loves trains, so recently when we took him on the Trinity Park Mini train, he didn’t think it was enough. He wanted to go on a REAL train. So I decided we would go on the Trinity Railway Express (TRE), just for the fun of it. We set a day — yesterday — packed a lunch, and set off with his brother (12) and sister (9). It would be a far more meaningful trip than I initially expected.

Taking the TRE to Dallas could hardly be easier, or cheaper. You go to the T&P Park and Ride station on the Downtown side of Lancaster Blvd. very close to where the I30 crosses the 35W freeway. Do not go to the main station, called the “Intermodal Center,” because there is no free parking there. Get your all-day ticket for $5 (children $1.50) which gets you on not only the TRE but the DART trains (and buses) in Dallas. Now sit back, probably on a double-decker passenger car, and enjoy the ride.

We ate lunch in the ornate courtyard of the Trammel Crowe building, which was beautiful and serene.

My youngest son loved it, as did his older brother and sister. Of course, once we got to Dallas, we had to do something to justify the effort of going out there. I wanted to take them to the Dallas World Aquarium but it was too expensive. So I went for the high value/low admission price route: museums. We visited the Crowe Museum of Asian Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Dallas Museum of Art.

The Crowe Museum was all right, but the Nasher was the prize of the day. Finally, after years of taking kids to art museums and having them not “get it”, the kids began to actually participate in the experience. Part of the thrill was the garden setting of much of the art, and the lowering of the tension surrounding getting too close. Most pieces are still off limits to touch, but it’s much more on the honor system than in, say, the Kimbell, which has the jumpiest guards I’ve ever seen.

Much of the kids’ enjoyment seemed to be the puzzle aspect of the art, which was “modern and contemporary” (that means, generally, that it was created in the last 100 years.) They wanted to know what the artists were thinking, what they meant when the built the art, and what it represented. We spent a long time going from statue to statue, talking about them.

Brand very much liked this "Quantum Cloud XX (tornado)" sculpture by Antony Gormley. The statue is constructed entirely of small steel bars, and looked at from the front, without shadow, the man inside can be difficult to make out.

After finishing with the Nasher, we went on the the Dallas Museum of Art, though were were pretty tired by that time. If my husband had been there he would have insisted, probably, that we stay until midnight (the museum was apparently having some special event that allowed visitors that late) but we satisfied ourselves with a visit to the interactive room where the kids were provided with art supplies and told to create their own “works.”

kids enjoyed creating their own works in the Dallas Musuem of Art's creativity room.

We stayed in this place for a long time. The materials offered were tape, sea shells, cardboard, gold foil paper, and pipe cleaners. Before you say “this is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of” let me tell you the kids found it very meaningful, and Angelo spent the entire time building a Japanese Spider Crab, he said, out of the pipe cleaners and gold paper, with mini-sea shells for eyes.

I eventually had to drag them out of there because we were going to miss the train we were planning on catching.

As we rode the DART light right to Union Station in Dallas to catch the TRE back home, I noticed we were passing Deally Plaza where the Kennedy Assassination occured, and 6th Floor museum … and we hadn’t even stopped! Clearly, another visit to Dallas was called for.

Reflecting on all this now, the time we spent in Dallas seems magical. I felt for once that I was not alone in the community, that I was part of a greater group of people, which included not just my children, and my region, but my world — and they weren’t all different, they were united through this common world of what I think used to be called “the sublime,” but which I have termed, more often, “the world of ideas” or “the life of the soul.” We came, we saw, we shared in some kind of discourse. For one day, fear and worry were banished, and all I thought about was ideas and creativity. What a great moment.

Organic tomato harvest was a good one, despite the plants being attacked by wilt as the tomatoes ripened.

First: the good news. The tomatoes have produced a large crop — probably about ten pounds — of yellow and red organic tomatoes. Also, the chickens, interestingly, have started laying again, despite the daily over-100 heat. I don’t know how long this will last but it’s good as far as it goes.

On the bad side, a type of tomato wilt is taking over the garden. My stepfather David visited the Cowtown Farmer’s Market last weekend, partly to check out the stuff they were selling, and partly to ask for advice since his tomatoes have the wilt as well. The chief advice? Choose wilt resistent varieties. I did notice that the Celebrity tomato seems perkier and stronger against the wilt than the others. The heirloom variety I planted seems to have no green leaves left. We will soon have to tear out the tomatoes. David is, I think, starting some new tomatoes in the Gurney Smart Start so perhaps we can still have a fall crop.

Meanwhile, to try to make an accounting of the current state of “Mom Farm:”

Income:

Organic chicken eggs:  maybe 132 this year at 25 cents each: $33.

And tomatoes: 10 lbs at $3 per pound, $30.

Basil: Ten bundles at $1.75 per bundle: $17.50

Yellow crookneck squaush: 1 at $.75.

Total income: $81.25

Costs?

Chicken food — $24.

Seeds and drip watering supplies, hardware for chicken pen: $30

(Then there is the money that my mother and stepfather put into the drip system, garden boxes, and berry vines, but I don’t know that I can bill against a gift. Also, in fairness anything used over the space of several years has to be depreciated, not charged out total.) So:

total expense: $54

Current “farm” income: $27.25.

Not much, I suppose, when you consider the amount of labor. It’s probably best looked at as a hobby that pays you back. And the year’s not over, so maybe we’ll get more crops.

On the last day of our Minnesota sojourn, we were invited to join my brother and his family on Lake Washington, which has a long family history as a recreation center, going back to our original immigrant ancestor, Louis Linder, who had a vacation house built there back in 1880 or so, when you had to drive a horse and buggy to get out there.

These days, of course, you take the car and get on a motorboat. Fortunately for us, the weather was excellent. All week long, it had been barely warm and had rained, it would seem, ever night, testing our camping mettle.  At the lake the main activity was to get in the motorboat and speed around at up to 50 mph, which I felt was a little fast, especially when riding in the nose of the boat, although the lake was almost like glass.

Most of the afternoon we spent on an activity called “tubing” which has, apparently, largely replaced waterskiing as the entertainment used by people who want to be pulled behind boats. My brother had a large “tube” (really, it was an inflatable raft, bright red, with handles on it so you could lean with the motion of the raft or cling for dear life, as the occassion warranted). The tube would accomodate three children or two adults comfortably. While I watched Angelo on the beach, my brother ran the boat up and down the lake, pulling kids on the tube, swiveling side to side, speeding up, slowing down, all to their great delight.

They simply could not get enough of this game. Finally, however, I had had enough. “This is not fair, the kids are having too much fun,” I said. I want to try tubing,” I told Nick. “Dean, will you go with me?”

Dean, perhaps, did not actually want to get on the tube, but neither did he want to be seen as the kind of guy who would not do it, either, I assume, so he put on a lifejacket and climbed onto the floating mini-boat with me.

“Keep the nose up when the boat starts, or you’ll go underwater,” Nick yelled and fired up the engine.

The experience of being pulled by a boat through the water is an exhillirating one, more and more so as you get used to it and begin to think that you are actually relatively safe. “What can happen to you out in the middle of the lake?” my brother asks philosophically. Of course, this is the guy who lit off all those illegal fireworks in the backyard earlier this week, so one does tend to think his safety standards are not the most rigorous on earth. On the other hand, you can make life almost perfectly safe, but unbearably boring by worrying about things, and as we rode the tube around the lake, I laughed and laughed. Finally after years of doing boring stuff like washing dishes and keeping children clean and safe, I was out on the lake, riding a tube, having some real excitement.

I looked over at my better half. He was giving the “thumbs down” I want to get off signal. Well, fine. If he didn’t want to do this, I knew I could get my kids to ride with me. “Vince, Brand,” I called and they came down to ride the tube. Then I rode with their younger sister,  Joanna — who is incredibly light so the tube just skimmed across the water, and she also fell off twice. Then I had to go for the Big Kahuna. My brother.

“Come on, Nick, you come out here on the tube.”

Nick tried to get out of it. After all, he explained, we were here for the kids, and the guests, he was just the boat driver.

“I came all the way out here to Minnesota, and I want you to go tubing with me.”

It appeared he was afraid to ask his wife to drive the boat so we could ride. “And Dad wants to go home,” he told me. “I just don’t know.”

“Come on, Nick, you’re going on the tube with me.”

“Oh come on.”

“I’m gonna tell Dad on you.”

So, he had to come out and ride. His wife Jill, of course, didn’t look like she minded at all as she got behind the wheel. In fact, she appeared to be looking forward to it. Nick seemed worried. “She can be vicious,” he said. “We better watch out, this is going to be a wild ride.”

The lake started going by at a very fast pace, combined with some sharp turns and ‘catching air’as we flew from one side of the wake to the other. Nick didn’t seem phased as Vincent snapped away with the camera. Finally, on one particularly tight bend when the J-Force got to be too much, Nick let go. I did not, not because I wasn’t ready to get off but because I was afraid to be left in the middle of the lake while to boat came around.

We came back and went to pick him up. “All right, what a ride!” he exclaimed as he got on for the second round, coordinating Jill to drive us past the shore  for a dramatic dismount from the tube in front of the place where Dad was sitting. The boat powered up, we whipped around the lake one more time, and then, right as we passed my father’s chair, Nick said “Now!” and we both let go at the same time.

It was a great end to a great day. As we pulled ourselves out of the water, Vince seemed to feel he didn’t like his Mom stealing the finale. The kids didn’t want to quit, in fact, and Vince said he thought more tubing would be a great idea. “You know what would be really great?” he asked me. “Tubing across the Gulf of Mexico.”

My son thinks big like a Texan, I guess. Let’s just hope he never gets the backing to actually try that particular mission. I must have some Minnesotan still in me, because like the generations of my family that have come here for sport, I felt Lake Washington was just about right.

The other day we went to see the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. A good hour and a half drive away from where we were staying, we worried about making the trip, but in the end, no other good ideas presenting themselves, we took off in mid morning, after dropping the two oldest boys off at my brothers house, where they could play video games all day instead of enrich their minds. Although I did believe they would derive some benefit, possibly, from seeing the prairie home of the famous American author, I also wanted to enjoy it myself, and knew that having them around could very well preclude that entirely.

The museum, standing out in s small town set among the fields of corn and soybeans, turned out to be very well developed. It included a display of family pictures and books, a large gift shop, and some mementos from the TV show, which I skipped as I

1. Didn’t watch the TV show,
2. Don’t believe in TV shows as a reputable artistic medium (Exception: Star Trek TOS) and
3. Was irritated at the TV show for widely departing from the book, which is said to be more rather than less a factual history, and as such moved the Wilders into a type of fiction I feel the author may not have intended.

Elsewhere on the complex, an old farmhouse offered interpretive exhibits of settler life, the churning of butter, and very fine hands-on room with dresses and petticoats to try on, real slates, which were drawn on not with chalk but with another piece of slate, creating a thin white line, and an organ which ran on foot pedal power complete with simple music that I and Dean were able to play, from our long-ago piano training. Outside, a life size replica of the dugout the Ingalls Family lived on, which you could actually go into, and another full-size building replicating the wood plank house that Pa Ingalls built on the Minnesota prairie, was memorable.

The Ingalls dugout site. Off to the left is the grove of plums.

The real find for true fans of the book, however, is the Ingalls Dugout Site. Located on private land owned by the Gordon family ($4 a person entry charge) you can see the beauty and potential of the Ingalls Dugout site, walk around on mown trails and paths, see the indentation on the ground where the dugout was, with two paths going down to where the door would have been, just as was illustrated by Garth Williams in the original book, By the Banks of Plum Creek. Here you can see the plum grove that is mentioned in the book, the tablelands that Laura describes, and the creek itself, which babbles sweetly. The height of the corn the Gordons are growing on the property testifies to the ultimate value of the land here, bringing poignancy to the Ingalls family’s decision to move on.

I stopped for a moment by myself to listen to the creek as it bounced over a submerged rock, and think about the author and her lost childhood, symbolic, perhaps, of our own childhoods so long ago. A pioneer girl had played here, I thought to myself, when the land was scarcely ceded by the Indians – the Dakota War of 1962 had been only eight years before – and medical care, technology, everything had been rudimentary. What brought them out here, I wondered?

Kids walk down the path in a scene which recalls the Garth Williams illustration of the book, On the Banks of Plum Creek

They were dreamers, the Ingalls family. Though they knew how to build many implements and tools and how to survive in a wild country, ultimately, if you follow the number of removes and trail of surrendered and sold and abandoned farms, you come to realize that they were somewhat impractical in their decisions about where to homestead. “My father was no businessman,”  Laura Ingalls wrote much later. Her decision to romanticize her father’s memory in the books appears more and more studied as one visits the sites and reads, as I did begin to do as soon as we got in the car to go back, her biography.

For example, in Little House on the Prairie, Pa emphasizes that another settler family had their horses stolen because they didn’t have the sense to keep a dog around. Pa would never sell their brindle bulldog, Jack, according to the story. But in reality he did just that, trading the dog to go along with a pair of horses.

I think this over. If Pa was not really so practical in real life, where did the characteristics of sober management come from? Perhaps Pa’s wisdom as it appears from the books came from … Almanzo, Laura’s husband? Whatever the answer to this and other Ingalls Wilder conundrums, the value of visiting historic sites is to lead to reflection and make one think, lead to further studies and enrich the mind, and the Walnut Grove homesite of the Ingalls family definitely gets an A+++ for that purpose.