The Reindeer Keeper

  I've written so much about growing up in the country in one of the four houses in a row full of family, and the old chicken coop converted to a clubhouse where I'd play with cousins, day after day after day, using our imaginations, using the books and chalkboards and desks the adults bought from an abandoned schoolhouse, bringing them home and putting them in our converted chicken coop for us to enjoy. And that is just what we did. Sometimes, I'd bring a book I was reading to the clubhouse. So would a certain cousin. We made time in our busy schedule to read our books. Those books might have been Nancy Drew titles or books written by Louisa May Alcott. One thing for sure, many of those books were from 'The Little House on the Prairie Book Series,' books more often than not bought by our grandmother and given to us with love as gifts for Christmas. IF MY GRANDMOTHER ONLY KNEW that very book series, she bought for us as gifts is now on the most recent list of Banned...

I have my grandmother to thank for introducing me to books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I didn't realize at the time how those books and that writer would influence me or how the storylines would follow me through adulthood as favorite ones ever read. I don't remember how old I was when I found "Little House in the Big Woods" wrapped in tissue paper under the Christmas tree. It would be the first of many of this author's books I'd receive. I never had a favorite. From "The Long Winter" to "On the Banks of Plum Creek" I absorbed every word. I could see Laura living in her sod house or surviving what must have seemed a never-ending winter. Sometimes I'd take one with me when going to play in the chicken coop clubhouse and sometimes, I found time to read. The books fit right in to the surroundings since the chicken coop had been gutted and filled with the remains of an abandoned one-room schoolhouse. It mirrored the classroom in the ...