My First Love

When I was a girl, I fell in love.  It was purely innocent and not a physical love, but a love nonetheless.  This man that I was head over heels for had curly brown hair.  He cried at the drop of a hat.  He loved animals.  He was musical.  He adored his family.  He could fix anything.  He danced.  He had the best smile in the whole world.  He pulled off suspenders like a natural and always left a few buttons open at the top of his shirt to appear just a bit more manly.  He was an entrepreneur.  He tucked his kids into bed.  When the going got rough, he pulled up his bootstraps and sacrificed the world for his family.  He laughed contagiously.  He was generous.  He stood up for his family and for others.  He loved everyone.  He brought home the strays.  His best friend was a drunk, but he loved him nonetheless.  He adopted kids and treated them as his own.  He was the "richest man in Walnut Grove."

Ok, so that last sentence gave him away, but what do you expect?  Didn't everyone love Michael Landon?  Didn't everyone want him as their Pa?  I am currently reading a book, The Wilder Life, by Wendy McClure.  It is bringing up all kinds of memories about my first love.  So much so, I spent the better part of Sunday watching clips on Youtube of Little House.  So far, it's a great read and I am kicking myself for not coming up with this idea for a book in the first place!  I mean, who doesn't love Laura Ingalls Wilder?!?

And now this book has got me thinking, how much of my own dreams are wrapped up in the idealism that Laura created for me?  I confess, that I have hand stitched clothes, loved calico dresses, and I even have a pair of boots that Laura could have worn over a century ago.  My very favorite room was decorated Laura style with a calico print wallpaper in a slanted attic style room.  And when I tried out for Junior Rose Festival Princess when I was nine, they asked me what my favorite TV show was and I exclaimed, "Little House on the Prairie....because it's old!"  I think I meant old fashioned.  So maybe that is why a man with dirty hands turns me on, or a man who cries at the drop of a hat is like the sexiest thing in the world.  Pa has simply warped my sense of reality.  He's given me too much to hope for right?  Maybe that is why I love to grow my own food, and why I wore my hair in two long braids for the entirety of first and second grade.  I have internalized perfection...and it is somewhere on the banks of Plum Creek.