Peter working on paper airplanes during a long drive.

Epic tetherball contest.

After Tulsa, we visited Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, MO, which was the home Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Laura wrote the Little House books here. Mansfield is in the Ozarks. It is rolling pastureland edged by leafy woods. The pastures are pocked with rolled hay bales. (I went on a trip one time with a girl who told me the “truth” about hay bales as we drove along. With perfect solemnity she warned me they were really hay animals, who ate up all the cows at night. You’ll notice there aren’t cows in harvested hayfields.) There is a kind of sunshine that pours through shade trees on a blue sky day and dapples things like old, white clapboard farmhouses. It’s my favorite kind of beautiful. I forget it in Lubbock, where there aren’t so many trees, and it surprises me every time I come back to it. I start feeling sentimental and usually get to crying. So, I had to wear my sunglasses most of the tour.

I just finished reading Little House in the Big Woods to the littlest girls, and they’re eager to start the next installment, Little House on the Prairie. Hopefully, we’ll have made some progress in it by the time we get to DeSmet, SD, where there’s another Laura home place. We saw Pa’s fiddle and lots of other treasures we recognized from the stories. One of my favorite items was the Christmas clock Almanzo traded for his hay in The First Four Years. I’m always amazed at how hard the Ingalls and Wilders worked and how resilient they were in coping with hardship. Laura and Almanzo came to Mansfield in a wagon following the death of an infant son and a fire that left them with few belongings. With a hundred dollar bill, which caused a panic when it went missing temporarily on the journey, and a loan from the Mansfield bank, they purchased a 40-acre farm with reliable spring-fed water in apple country, and they built a successful farming enterprise. The house started as a one room log cabin, but it was gradually transformed into a comfortable ten-room house over the course of seventeen years. I also had no idea how famous their daughter, Rose, became. She was a renowned journalist and novelist long before her mother began writing.