Little House

My niece spent the night Friday. Along with an armload of stuffed animals and a Powder Puff Girls nightie, she brought Little House on the Prairie. She's obsessed, just like I was at nine.

While we drove to the pool after our pizza date with Uncle T, she told me she can't wait for fourth grade to start and how she wants to read every single Laura Ingalls Wilder book. Alas, at the library we discovered that the one she wanted was checked out. I promised her my set.

I found the books in my parents' basement, along with my Easy Bake oven, some Tinker Toys and a Rubik's Cube that I think I "solved" by peeling off the colors and replacing them in the right spots. Finding those books took me back to the summer afternoons I spent sprawled on the pleather couch at my grandparents' cabin and those endless car trips in the station wagon, fighting over the imaginary line down the back seat with my brother, my niece's dad. One of the books has a foil sticker from the Wilder homestead in De Smet, South Dakota. We visited Mount Rushmore and stayed in the Flintstones Campground. I'm sure my brother and I fought all the way across Nebraska.

I had a pang over letting go of my books, some of the few childhood things I still own.

But why save them? So they can molder in my parents' basement until I die and she's 60, having to sort through my junk?

I'll hand them off tomorrow to the little girl who's getting to know Pa and Mary, so she has some company during those long, hot days, waiting for fourth grade to start.