little house

I was in line at the co-op when the seven-year-old girl in front of me started chatting with me.

"What's your name?" she eventually asked. When I responded, she got an excited look on her face and followed up with, "Are you named after Laura Ingalls Wilder?"

I was tempted to say yes, because that would probably make her day. Instead I told her, "No, but I read all of her books and I loved them!"

She explained to me that she's watching all of the movies, but some day she'll read all the books. And she's sure that the books will be better, because the books are always better than the movies. "There's so much more content in the books that they don't have time to put in the movies," she told me with the certainty of someone who's read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies in her life.

I told her that I agree, and she should definitely read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books soon, so she can find out all the exciting things they didn't put in the movies.

And then I reminisced about my kindergarten days when I wore my hair in braided pigtails and carried a bookbag with my name and some strawberries stenciled on it. A third grader on the bus used his powers of compilation to give me the nickname Laura Ingalls Strawberry. Luckily, it was a little too long to stick.