Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

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Snapshots from a Little House life

April 3, 2011 by Wendy

1968: According to the caption in our family photo album, this is OUR HOMESTEAD. Not long after they got married (and before I was born), my parents bought a parcel of land near Belen, New Mexico (south of  Albuquerque, where they met). They bought it at as an investment, with maybe the vague idea that they’d build on it some day if it was worth something.

(Note that the mountain is not included.)

 

 

 

Of course, when I was a kid in Chicago I always imagined that we’d wind up here and build a shanty or something. My parents did end up moving back to New Mexico in 2006, but they bought a place with running water and electricity and a hot tub in the backyard, because they’re no fun at all.

Apparently my dad still owns the land, and it still looks exactly like this.

 

 

1979: Our very own Long Winter in Oak Park, Illinois. I’m pretty sure the Blizzard of ’79 coincided with my Little House reading years. The snow in Chicago was so heavy that garage roofs began to collapse around the city.  One night my dad had to go out on the roof of the front porch and shovel off those snowdrifts—a feat that seemed at least as thrillingly treacherous as Cap and Almanzo’s seed wheat rescue.

I remember being disappointed that I couldn’t look out my bedroom window and see the snow at eye level the way Laura could.

 

1980 (?): You may have already read about how I was in a community theater production of A Christmas Carol and got to wear a bonnet. And a long dress. And a crocheted shawl.

This was pretty much the high point of my life, I think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1981 (?): Here I am at my own version of Plum Creek, at a campground west of Chicago that we’d visit two or three times a year, mostly on holiday weekends. I fished (badly), waded, caught crayfish (or at least watched people catch them), and tragically lost swim toys to the current. If I could have done all of it while wearing a calico dress, I would have.

I also tried my damnedest to grow my hair long enough to braid.  You might have been able to wrench a couple of pathetic pigtails out of that mess, but just barely. That’s the longest I’ve ever been able to grow it.

 

2009: But who needs good hair when you have a BONNET? I bought at this one the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Kansas and preened in the mirror of my motel room in Springfield, Missouri. The first of many bonnets I would buy, and many, many more dorky photos.

 

Speaking of pictures, I’m in the process of putting up more photos of my Little House trips and shenanigans on The Wilder Life’s Flickr page as well as the Facebook page, so stay tuned.

Also! Book review blogger extraordinaire The Girl from the Ghetto has posted a truly EPIC review and giveaway of The Wilder Life today, so if you want another chance to win a copy of the book before it officially launches a week from Thursday, GO ENTER.

Filed Under: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House Shenanigans, personal, The Wilder Life

IT CAN’T BEAT US*

February 6, 2011 by Wendy

The Long Winter of 1979
Me during the Blizzard of '79. I still miss that blue plush coat.

*I have this idea that for the rest of the winter I could name blog entries after chapter titles in The Long Winter. Need to find some reason to have a blog post called “ANTELOPE!”

Coming home early on Tuesday afternoon and watching the blizzard begin was an exquisitely giddy experience. I just sat by the big window by my desk and watched the snow come in careening gusts of wind.

No, I didn’t try to make this snowstorm one of my Little House reenactment projects, though I did have lots of Long Winter thoughts, and they swirled around in my head with all my modern neuroses. Like I was thinking that if the power went out I could use my quaint, adorable oil lamp, and then I remembered that my laptop’s battery function was broken, which of course freaked me out because THEN I’d have to make a tiny little generator with the old-fashioned coffee grinder and spend every morning hand-cranking a meager little serving of wireless while Chris twisted Chicago mayoral campaign junk mail into bundles of fuel.

But that didn’t happen. Our power stayed on, though the wind blew so hard I could feel our building shake, and there was lightning and thunder (which in a snowstorm looks and sounds really insane, like the earth is going to break open and fling up Superman’s Fortress of Solitude or something), and we were fine. Our car was stuck in the garage for three days until Chris was finally able to shovel out a narrow passage allowing the car to just barely squeeze through the waist-high snowbanks; the first time we pulled out the snow squeaked, like giant styrofoam wedges.  And if I were to describe the blizzard experience overall, I would say it was almost fun, thanks to this improbably comfy world we live in, with all this home insulation and central heat and horseless-carriage-plows.

And “almost fun” except for the free-floating sensation that’s been lingering these few days after the storm, when everything seems to stand still and sometimes it’s all I can do to complete the simplest tasks, even when the weather has kept me at home and opened up new vistas of spare time. But I guess it’s no coincidence that Laura feels “stupid” so many times during The Long Winter. (And I love that Google Books lets me look that up.) I have so much to do in the next few months between work and the book coming out, but maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself when I find myself wanting to just sit around and stare at the stove fire (or, really, Season 3 of Jersey Shore).

Hope you all are doing okay with your own Long Winters.

*   *   *

Wedding Planning Question Corner (which will perhaps be an occasionally recurring feature this year): What do you have to do to get to talk to a caterer? We’re still looking for one and I seem to be sending a lot of emails and voicemails into the void lately.

*   *   *

Book release stuff: my event schedule is being finalized right now, so if you’re in or near Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Iowa City, or Kansas City, I’ll have news for you soon…

Filed Under: Chicago, Little House Shenanigans, personal

Your questions answered, plus ME IN A BONNET

December 19, 2010 by Wendy

To answer the three most frequently asked questions I’ve gotten from people since we got engaged last weekend:

1.) Chris and I haven’t set a date yet, but are planning for sometime in the fall.

2.) No, we are NOT having a Little-House themed wedding. I will not wear a poke bonnet, walk down the aisle to fiddle music, and ride off on a covered wagon. It’s sort of cool that Laura Ingalls Wilder wore black for her wedding, but I seriously doubt I could pull off that look without looking like Louise Fletcher in Flowers in the Attic.  (And no, we are not having a V.C. Andrews-themed wedding either, though if another couple ever decides to go that route, PLEASE SEND PICTURES.)

3.) Also, Chris did not propose on a buggy ride while driving his team of Morgan horses. How did Almanzo manage to slip the ring onto Laura’s finger with one hand while he held the reins with the other? He had some slick moves, that Manly. Chris made me get out of the car. (And then walk with him to the pop-the-question spot.) I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We just barely got the tree up this season, I haven’t baked any cookies or made any gingerbread creations (sorry), and I totally missed seeing the Santa Train, but this is turning out to be one of the best holidays ever.

Speaking of Christmas and wearing bonnets: as much as I loved the Little House books as a kid, I never had my own sunbonnet or any other kind of prairie girl getup. You’d think this would’ve bothered me, but somehow it didn’t, and now I remember why. It’s because for two Christmas seasons, right around the peak of my Little House adoration, I got to dress up all 19th-century for a community theater adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.”

It was a musical production at the Village Players theater in Oak Park and it was called, I kid you not, Ebenezer! I was in the children’s chorus. The first year I performed (1980 I think?) I got to wear a long red velvet dress, a bonnet, and a shawl. The second year my costume had a fur muff.  I knew from reading On the Banks of Plum Creek that muffs were the It Accessory of the 1870s, and I about lost my mind when the wardrobe lady gave me one to wear.

Here I am in my red dress, delivering my one line, which I can still remember: “I got new skates! They’re made out of real steel!”

Maybe I wasn’t convincing enough, because in the following year’s production my line was simply, “Oh, there’s Tim.” But whatever, I had the MUFF that year.  If you look in the picture below, I think the girl in the white cape in the front row had it.

Why the heck weren’t we wearing gloves if it was supposed to be December in London? We look way too happy and warm to be Dickensian urchins. Also the kid in black on the left is supposed to be Tiny Tim. That’s right: the tallest kid in the group. But never mind, it was Christmas. God bless us, everyone!  And God help us this next year.  Merry Christmas!

Filed Under: Chicago, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House Shenanigans, personal

Uncertain pies (AKA the search for the green pumpkin)

November 18, 2010 by Wendy

There are a few things on my Little House Bucket List that I didn’t get to write about in the book. One of those was making a green pumpkin pie like the one Ma Ingalls makes in The Long Winter. In Chapter 3, an early October frost kills the garden, and Ma, perhaps thinking of ways to make the most of their tiny harvest, improvises a mock apple pie from an unripe pumpkin and surprises Pa with it that night.

I wrote about that chapter this past January on the Beyond Little House blog because the green pumpkin pie has always fascinated me. Back when I first read the books I thought green pumpkins had a sort of vague magic to them, or that Ma knew some wacky science-fair kind of trick that could turn pumpkin bits into apples just by pouring vinegar on them. Who wouldn’t want to try to make a pie that changes the laws of nature? Since The Little House Cookbook by Barbara Walker has a recipe for the pie, I was sure that I’d be able to make one for the book.

Except I couldn’t score an unripe pumpkin last fall. Barbara Walker warned me that it would be tricky to find one if I didn’t grow my own pumpkins, and by the time I started asking vendors at the farmers’ market, I was too late—it was October and all the pumpkins had turned orange. Stupid nature!

So this year I started earlier. I took weekly morning walks in September over to the Lincoln Square farmer’s market and found a produce stand guy who said he’d bring me a green pumpkin. Wait about two weeks, he said, but I went back the next week just to remind him.  Finally, the week after that, in mid-September, he hauled out a green pumpkin and sold it to me for a price that would surely dismay Ma.

Green pumpkin

It was so big I had to take it home on the el, at about 7:30 am, on a train filled with morning commuters. (Nobody cared.) It was a glorious sight.

Green pumpkin It was only Tuesday, and I wasn’t planning on making the pie until the weekend. I began to worry that it would continue to ripen, so that night I cut it open and sliced it into small, thin, apple-like bits.

Slicing it thin It didn’t have that slightly rank, squashy smell that pumpkins tend to have at Halloween carving time, which was a good sign. There was way more pumpkin than I needed, so I stored a big container full of the cut bits, enough to make two pies, and reluctantly threw the rest of it out.

As my luck would have it, that weekend, I had to attend an all-day conference on Saturday, a party the same night, and then a column to write on Sunday. It was a heck of a time to have to make the pie, but of course you have to gather ye green pumpkins while ye may, as the saying goes.

Crust

For the pie crusts, I made the Little House Cookbook recipe from scratch bought some pre-made crusts, the kind you only have to unroll and tuck into the pan. I know, Ma would disapprove of all this store-boughten fanciness. But it’s been years since I made pie crust. I had only a couple hours on Saturday evening to make the pies, and I worried that the whole thing would be a disaster if I tried to make everything from scratch. And based on the accounts of other people who’d made green pumpkin pie, I was expecting mixed results.  Life is too short to make crust for uncertain pies, I thought, as I unrolled the dough. Maybe I’ll stitch that on a sampler someday when I’m not so lazy.

I filled the crusts with the pumpkin bits, brown sugar and spices, and poured a little Newton’s Folly hard cider over it all. Barbara Walker claims hard cider is more like 19th-century vinegar than other kinds of vinegar. (It was one of the few ingredients that I already had on hand.)

Assembling the pie

The pies smelled amazing while they baked and turned out much better than I expected. The filling didn’t have the squashy taste that others had reported from their experiences. The pumpkin pieces cooked down nicely and were tender and sort of translucent.

Out of the oven

And yet, it didn’t taste like apple pie, not really—just some kind of cinnamony-spicy concoction.  It was also a very wet pie, really a puddle with a crust. It was definitely edible, though, if on the bland side. But if you were Pa Ingalls and likely hadn’t had an apple since about 1874, you’d probably really dig it.

I brought one of the pies to the party that night—a gathering at a bar for a friend’s birthday. There were a lot of people there and I tried to warn everyone about the pie’s experimental nature.  One friend said, “As an apple pie, it’s disappointing, but for what it is, it’s pretty good.”

I decided that if it had tasted exactly like apple pie it would have been pretty creepy. I was also relieved that there wasn’t a massive blizzard the very next day, the way there was in the book.

In the end, I concluded, everything was as it ought to be. Apples were still apples, pumpkins stayed pumpkins, there were no October blizzards, and I’m still too lazy to make my own pie crust.

Kind of a messy pie

For more photos of the pie-making (and other Little House stuff to come), I’ve set up a Flickr site for the book.

Also, The Wilder Life is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Indiebound and elsewhere. (Also, it’ll be an audio book! Don’t think I mentioned that before, but more on that soon!)

Filed Under: Chicago, Little House Shenanigans

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The Wilder Life on Flickr

Recent Press and Links

  • Essay: A Little House Adulthood For the American Masters documentary on Laura Ingalls Wilder, I contributed a piece to the PBS website about revisiting the Little House books.
  • Essay: The Christmas Tape (At Longreads.com) How an old audio tape of holiday music became a record of family history, unspoken rituals, and grief.
  • Q & A With Wendy McClure Publishers Weekly interview about editing, Wanderville and more.

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Where else to find Wendy

  • Candyboots Home of the Weight Watcher recipe cards
  • Malcolm Jameson Site (in progress) about my great-grandfather, a Golden Age sci-fi writer.
  • That Side of the Family My semi-secret family history blog
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