"This is what we wanted, isn't it? A fresh start in a new place?"

When I was leaving Maritsa's Cafe' in Maple Shade today, a man said something about the awful heat and I replied "Thank God for air conditioning." And he replied "Carrier is my big hero. Imagine living in the old West before air conditioning or even fans?" And I added, "before dentists or doctors, going to the barber shop for a wound treatment or bone setting." We both chuckled and said a little gratitude for modern times.

In another conversation with a friend, we were talking about favorites and I was thinking how many of my favorite books were connected to an event such as Pioneer Women which I read in airports when I was in my 30's and flying out west to meet up with my fiance' Rob Sweetgall on his around the perimeter of the USA ultramarathon venture (I blogged about him when I foud out he had died). I was in an air conditioned airport reading about women going mad from the sound of the wind howling on the prairie when they were isolated from all other human beings and their husbands were off on ling trips to acquire lumber or some other resource. It reminded me of a short story that I think was by Hart Crne about a man going crazy trying to fend off the wolves that were after his wife's dead body in the winter in their isolated cabin in the forest. The wolves could smell her corpse.

Having given birth, a terrifying and hideously painful experience, I always think about women in the years before anaesthesia or in places where there were no other women to help or midwives. Another great book The Midwife's Tale. My final comment to the lunch man was "Best to leave the passt in the past."

The comedian Kathleen Madigan has a funny bit about her roots in the "middle" - St. Louis, Missouri, where her pioneer family decided enough was enough and just stopped there. She fantasizes being stuck in a covered wagon with her adventure seeking husband and fantasizing where to shoot him and leave his body before she turns the horses aroound and goes back home. "I don't know" she'd say, "It was a tragic accident."

Something I never thought about that I learned from Pioneer Women was that most of those westward covered wagon women were educated and comfortable in small towns with family and churches and conveniences like stores and neighbors nearby, and midwives! Their husbands craved the "Free Land"(that wasn't free, only stolen from the Indigenous people - a concept they were incapable of holding) and the adventure of someplace new and the women were kind of dragged along in their husband's dream. Living in a soddy.

I have a doll from my early 50'6 childhood, an Effanbee doll given to me for Christmas one year by my beloved Godfather Neal Schmidt. She is a walker. Along the years, she lost her hair and her original clothes. At some point I bought her a wig. At another point after I read a new biography, Prairie Fire, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. I bought my doll a Little House on the Prairie Outfit and a bonnet to dress her up for Christmas that year.

little House on the Prairie has been reprised in tv series and I am watching it on Netflix (I think - could be amazon - I will correct this when I turn it on again). That's what reminded me of the biography and the set of books I read after I read the biography. I hadn't read the Little House on the Prairie books before but I had bought them for my daughter and I believe she did.

Doing what your husband wants when you don't want to reminded me of traveling in Europe, in North Africa; in Morocco, Mike met a young Moroccan man who wanted to show us the 'real' Morocco when we were in Casablanca. he took us to a coffee bar, off the beaten track, entirely composed of male patrons. Mike was glad to go on this adventure; I was horribly anxious, first that he would lead us somewhere we'd get lost and rob us, or that he would drug us at the cafe' and God knows what would happen to me. Neither of them considered my discomfort as the only white woman, 5 feet 8, blonde at the time with Western clothing in an all male establishment in a Muslim country. Fortunately, everyone was polite, perhaps stunned, and all was well. Still......

The book I read on my way to Europe to meet up with my drafted and deployed soldier husband was "Charles Darwin and The Voyage of the Beagle." While living in Germany, I read the only book I could get in English translation (it was 1969) Gunter Grqss's The Tin Drum. I didn't understand the political implications at all but I was captivated by it and the main character never understood anything that was happening to him either.

It is hard to list favorites because they are, of course, so tied up with time and place and experience. That was the theme of one of my daughter's favorite films, High Fidelity, John Cusack, main character is organizeing his record colletion by experience, specifically heartbreaking losses in romance. Food for thought - Happy Trails!

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