Always The Sky (Day One)

Last Wednesday Dave and I left town on the Southwest Chief Superliner, just after noon. The next morning was my birthday and I woke up somewhere in Kansas--around Lawrence, I think--and watched the sunrise.

We had breakfast--splitting an omelet and French toast--in the dining car, seated across from a Kansan Boy Scout troop leader and a cookie salesman from Los Angeles. (They were not traveling together.) The troop leader gave us some travel ideas (which we did not use--one suggestions was for the Precious Moments Chapel outside of Springfield) and filled us in on the local barbecue scene (information which we appreciated and did use).

An hour after breakfast, our 18-hour train ride came to an end as we came to a stop in Kansas City, Missouri.

We picked up our rental car, grabbed a coffee, and hit the road. Our first true stop was in southern Missouri in a town called Mansfield, three and a half hours away from Kansas City. We arrived around 1:30(?) checked into our accommodations for the evening, a small cabin in the woods, then we headed off to see what we came to Mansfield to see:

This is why we came.

Laura Ingalls Wilder settled in Mansfield in 1894 with her husband Almanzo and daughter Rose. There they bought 200 acres of farmland in the Ozarks, named it Rocky Ridge Farm, and built a house for themselves. This is that house:

It took them years and years to clear the land and build the house. For a long time they lived in a one-room log-cabin with their daughter Rose. They worked on the house bit by bit and it was finally finished in 1913.

Over time, the house went from two rooms to three to four and more, and from one story to two.

From the side, you can see the back additions. In the end, there was a kitchen with two stoves (an old wood burning stove and a gas stove) and low counters that Almanzo built to suit Laura (who was 4'10" or so), a screened-in porch, a formal dining room, a large front room with a big fireplace, a modern bathroom (added later by Rose) off the downstairs bedroom, a little library, a music room with an organ, a tiny office where Laura wrote, and an upstairs floor with Rose's bedroom and a guest room besides.

We were asked not to take photos inside the house (photos are available online), so I didn't. On the day we visited, it was nearly 100 degrees and around 95% humidity. The house has been retrofitted with air conditioning for modern tourists like me, but the heat once you stepped outside was oppressive.

We had toured the museum before we saw the house, and that alone was very strange, seeing things I'd always read about and pictured in my head. I forget, after years of reading her books, that she was a real person and she was writing about things that really (mostly anyway) happened to her. My imagination has filled in the blanks, of course, so it was strange to suddenly see real things like Pa's fiddle and his big green book, Mary's nine-patch quilt and Braille slate and beaded work, Ma's sewing machine, the lace that Ida gave Laura on her wedding day. There were other things to see too, not from Laura's books: novels that she turned into scrapbooks by glueing into them household hints she had carefully cut from the newspaper; her later needlework, including quilts and pillow toppers and a trio of dresses she made for herself; Almanzo's home-made shoes (one of his feet was crippled and withered, so he made his own shoes to fit).

It was all so strange and beautiful and because my brain and inner ear were still rocking from the train and exhausted from finals, the train ride, the long drive, the heat--it all felt dreamlike, unreal.

After our tour, we bought a couple of things in the museum (a book about Laura's life as a writer, a few postcards), stopped at the tiny grocery store in Mansfield, then went back to our little cabin in the woods.

I wasn't sure I was going to make it through preparing dinner even, but I rallied. We grilled vegetables (corn, cauliflower, onions, zucchini) on the charcoal grill on the deck, and had them with something else...some cheese and crackers, a few baby carrots. (There were slim picking for vegetarians in Mansfield's little grocery store; we consoled ourselves with Pringles.)

Dave had a few traveling birthday presents for me (several gorgeous hair ornaments, a complete set of Zebra Midliner highlighters, boxes of pens of the type that I love but that are hard to find, a double-sided pencil case) that I opened after dinner.

After my gifts, I changed into my pajamas, lay down on the bed and was out, completely and utterly out in minutes.