Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie was the primary dwelling of my childhood imagination. I'd never seen a prairie, not really understood what prairie meant. I imagined it as a vast expanse of flatness, the famed great plains, an unpopulated blank slate. Later, some movie helped me to add a visual of undulating golden grasses to my vision of prairie. The experience of childhood as portrayed by Ingalls Wilder was at once completely foreign and dearly familiar to me; I comprehended the simple, rustic pioneer lifestyle. The amount of hard labor necessary to run a homestead on the frontier in the late nineteenth century fascinated me, a child of the 1980s, of slightly hilly suburbs, whose home embodied no landscape and required little labor. And while the thought of a long winter stuck indoors without electricity or playmates seemed challenging, I entertained fantasies of frolicking in the spring prairie with young Laura Ingalls: soiling pinafores and thick stockings, picking leeches off our legs in a creek to watch blood dribble down goose bumpy skin that seldom saw the sun, playing the wildchild.
Colie contemplates an upcoming haircut
The prairie lands of the Midwest greet me this year with an enormous sky, rock roads at right angles, and strong winds. Grasses grow so tall and so fast-- up to eye level, and sometimes twice my height, but only in restored fields. Only recently did I recognize that these square, tree-lined acres should hardly resemble the treeless, roadless expanses Laura Ingalls frolicked in, for fewer fires and increasingly industrialized agriculture destroyed the prairie. Not tall grasses, but rather simplicity and ecology lured me here, but at DR we're pioneers too, restoring not only ecosystems, but also human systems. Ingalls Wilder would appreciate this social project. As she wrote in the Missouri Ruralist in 1917: "I believe we would be happier to have a personal revolution in our individual lives and go back to simpler living and more direct thinking. It is the simple things of life that make living worth while, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest and living close to nature."
Dancing Rabbit is facilitating personal revolutions left and right; focusing on the sweet fundamentals has finally enticed the gentle beast in me to come out and play.
Colie Ring came to DR as a garden work exchanger and is now a resident. After paying off her college loans in the outside world, she hopes to return to DR within the next three years.
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