I am reading the Annotated Edition of Pioneer Girl, The Autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Does this mean I lose my man-card? Here is my defense: Pioneer Girl, which Wilder finished in 1930, is not the sanitized version of Wilder’s life told in Little House on the Prairie. It’ s compelling, rich with details about the people and places of the prairies of southeastern Kansas, written in the first-person, creating an intimate look at everyday life — books, songs, Christmas presents, and all the items of that life.

“I lay there and looked through the opening in the wagon cover at the campfire with Ma and Pa sitting there,” she wrote on the first page. “It was lonesome and so still with the stars shining down on the great, flat land where no one lived.” I can attest to that. Last year I was in the Tall Grass Prairie Reserve of the Fint Hills of Kansas, and the slightly rolling hills stretch to the horizon unpeopled and almost flat. And beautiful. But imagine it without power lines, a ribbon of asphalt, or the occasional drone of an airplane, and you feel a great loneliness. You look out from your wagon bed and are comforted by the sight of your mother and father settling the day’s affairs over stiff black coffee.

I know that feeling. My parents did the same, only I viewed them from a bed under a roof, and they sat, speaking in low voices, around the kitchen table. I listened for any sign of worry in their voices, and not hearing any, could sleep. Pioneer Girl starts like this: “Once upon a time years and years ago, Pa stopped the horses and the wagon they were hauling away out on the prairie in Indian Territory. ‘Well, Caroline,’ he said ‘here’s the place we’ve been looking for. Might as well camp.’” That’s how all great stories begin, in a time and in a place. It makes you want to get out of town, to walk where the “stars are shining down.”

Alright, I confess. I watched all nine seasons of Little House. With my children. Of course.