The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure Page A

heat, since the boiler in our building wildly overcompensates during the deep winter months. It was an ideal temperature for growing sourdough, except that it tended to turn the top layer of batter into plaster. “Are you supposed to just let the stuff dry out like that?” Chris asked.
    I thought for a minute. In The Long Winter Pa brings home a sack of seed wheat and doesn’t know what the heck to do with it—boil it?—until Ma has an idea and takes out the coffee grinder.
    â€œI don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I said. “But I’m going to try something.” I went to the closet and got out our portable humidifier, which I filled with water and placed next to the radiator. Then I set out a new jar of batter.
    The next day when we got home from work the apartment smelled like bread, and the jar was filled with something that looked like alien spit. Beautiful alien spit, I mean. My own Scotch ingenuity had paid off.
    I held up the jar. “Let’s get grinding!” I said.
    Chris and I took turns grinding a whole pound of wheat that night on the couch in front of the TV.
    â€œI feel like I’m sharpening a great big endless pencil,” Chris said. “The dull, relentless pencil of winter.”
    â€œThe Ingalls family did this every day,” I pointed out. “And without French and Saunders to watch on DVD. ”
    When at last we’d produced a bowl of coarse, brown flour, I mixed it with the sourdough starter, salt, and baking soda and kneaded the resulting dough. It made a round little loaf the size of a small hat, and it barely rose in the pan.
    Almost as soon as it had come out of the oven we had to try it. The bread was steaming as I cut two wedges. It was coarse and a little crumbly, like soda bread. I blew on my wedge to cool it and then put it in my mouth, this tiny bit of time travel.
    In The Long Winter, Laura notes that the bread had “a fresh, nutty flavor that seemed almost to take the place of butter.” The bread we’d made did not taste like it needed butter, either, at least not while it was warm and soft. It was good enough that Chris said he’d eat it even if he wasn’t starving, but not so good that we’d be tempted to finish the loaf, even as small as it was.
    Somehow, it didn’t seem right to eat the whole thing and it didn’t seem right to waste it. And then, by the next day, it didn’t seem right to keep it. I took it to work and left it in the break room with a little note that said Long Winter Bread, for those who knew the story.

    â€œIf I had a remembrance book, I would surely write down about the day we came to Plum Creek and first saw the house in the ground,” Melissa Gilbert–as-Laura was saying in voice-over at the beginning of “Harvest of Friends,” the first episode in the TV series after the pilot. It was the one where the Ingalls family first comes to Walnut Grove. I was watching it one day in early February when I was home sick. I’d been trying to fight off the symptoms all that week, taking doses of some stuff everyone was recommending lately, some kind of homeopathic preventive thing that came in vials of sugary granules that I had to dissolve on my tongue. (It hadn’t been part of my occasional pretend-I’m-in-the-1800s plan to have faith in dubious remedies, but it was sort of turning out that way.)
    I watched as TV Laura came skipping out of what was apparently supposed to be the dugout house in On the Banks of Plum Creek, though it looked less like the lovely green grassy dwelling with flowers around the doorway shown in the books and more like a bomb shelter. But no matter, because it was never shown again anyway, and the story completely changed from Plum Creek to this whole other kooky plot where Pa fell out of a tree somehow, and the guy he worked for at the feed store was suddenly a big jerk and repossessed Pa’s team of oxen, and