The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure

old.
    In other words, the real-life Laura couldn’t have possibly been the Laura of the book, who was big enough to help Pa put up the cabin door and ask pointed questions about why they were settling in Indian Territory.
    Even though I’d always known the book was a novel, I nonetheless realized that all this time I’d truly, wholly believed that all the details of this book were from memory—the perfect circle of the sky around the wagon as it traveled on the desolate land, the prairie fire, everything. That it had all been lived, and that purity of recollection was what made Little House on the Prairie such a great book.
    Why, exactly, had I needed to believe that this book was a true record of Laura’s experiences? I couldn’t even say. I felt, really, like Laura did in the book, when she wanted to keep the Indian baby who was riding by, though she wasn’t able to say why, just that she’d looked into his eyes and felt a connection.
    Somehow, through the books—especially Prairie —I’d always felt like my mind had made some kind of direct contact with this other world and could go through the motions of living there by the sheer power of Laura’s memories. I thought the memories were what made Laura World the kind of place it was, some place I’d inhabited in my mind. Now it felt just as disputed a territory as that one lonely stretch of Kansas prairie.

    Making the Long Winter bread had suddenly become important. Deeply important.
    I had an antique coffee grinder now, and ajar full of seed wheat that I could grind into a primitive flour the way the Ingalls family had in The Long Winter . Now all I needed to make an authentic loaf of Long Winter bread was “the dish of souring”—sourdough bread starter.

    â€œIf you want to make a starter exactly as [Laura] did, without such helps as sugar, yeast, or milk,” Barbara Walker warned in The Little House Cookbook , “you may have to try several times.”
    Of course I wanted to make a starter exactly as Laura did! I had to, now that so much of what I thought I knew about Laura World was wrong. The Big Woods were not what they seemed, and the Little House on the Prairie was built on something other than recollection. I needed something real, even if it was only the taste of the improvised bread the Ingalls family ate every day for months during the Long Winter. Couldn’t you understand, Barbara Walker? This bread was all I had.
    And so I was prepared to try as hard as possible to make sourdough. And try I did over the course of three weeks, making half a dozen batches of flour-and-water batter, which I’d leave in ajar somewhere around the apartment in hopes that the Fermentation Fairy would visit and turn it into bread-making mojo. The jar would start out looking like milk gone bad, and after a day or two it would smell like it, too, always failing to rise or bubble. I went through most of a five-pound bag of King Arthur flour with my failed attempts.
    The batter needed to be near heat for fermentation to work (Ma kept her batter under the stove). I tried putting the jar directly beneath a lightbulb, near radiators, and in sunny spots, all to no avail. The whole process began to feel superstitious and weird. Why did I have to get rid of half the batter once I’d added more batter to double it? Couldn’t it just stay doubled? This thing that I was trying to make happen depended on so many different factors: water quality, temperature, humidity, improper covering, lack of patience. Making sourdough is about capturing something from the air, literally, and I began to imagine that this elusive element wasn’t just wild yeast particles but the residue of a lost world. It kept failing to materialize and I was making myself miserable over it.
    Chris noticed the jar on the windowsill one day. I’d left it near one of our radiators, which in the wintertime clanked and hissed and blasted