This week, we’ve started reading Little House in the Big Woods to The Daughter at bedtime. Keeping that in mind, here’s a portion of tonight’s dinner-table conversation:
ME: So, are you still reading Little House?
THE DAUGHTER: Yup.
ME: Ah. Did you get to the attack on the Indian village yet?
THE DAUGHTER: What?
ME: Yeah, the raid on the Indian village. Did you get to that part yet?
THE DAUGHTER: Dad, don’t tell me the end!
ME: Oh, but that’s not the end! It’s in the middle of the book…Pa takes a poisoned arrow and nearly dies, though. Later on, Mary becomes addicted to peyote.
THE DAUGHTER: (shakes head sadly) You make no sense.
I was bummed that the conversation trailed off there…I had something percolating in the back of my mind involving Mr. Edwards being Laura’s real father, owing to his illicit tryst with Caroline Ingalls some years before, and maybe also being a deserter from the Union army on the run from a pair of bounty hunters named Wilder, one of whom would later fall in love with Laura, who would have to choose between her love for the strapping young lad named Almanzo and the beloved Mr. Edwards. Yeah, that would have made those books more fun!