Wait for the Pie

A short excerpt from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy includes a delicious reminder about Thanksgiving priorities:

Almanzo simply ate. He ate ham and chicken and turkey, and dressing and cranberry jelly; he ate potatoes and gravy, succotash, baked beans and boiled beans and onions, and white bread and rye ’n’ injun bread, and sweet pickles and jam and preserves. Then he drew a long breath, and he ate pie.

When he began to eat pie, he wished he had eaten nothing else. He ate a piece of pumpkin pie and a piece of custard pie, and he ate almost a piece of vinegar pie. He tried a piece of mince pie, but could not finish it. He just couldn’t do it. There were berry pies and cream pies and vinegar pies and raisin pies, but he could not eat any more.

Source: "Every Meal Almanzo Eats in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy"

County Seat Towns, in 1880

An excerpt from our family reading, Mr. Edwards visits the Ingalls family in The Long Winter (before the long winter becomes a looooong winter):

This here country, it's too settled up for me. The politicians are a-swarming in already, and ma'am if'n there's any worst pest than grasshoppers it surely is politicians. Why, they'll tax the lining out'n a man's pockets to keep up these here county-seat towns! I don't see nary a use for a county, nohow. We all got along happy and content without 'em.

Our Home in Literature - Willa Cather

"Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. [In the country] you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones... We are all alike, we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners... All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own... We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder." - O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Our Home in Literature - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"In the central portion of the great North American Continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence." - A Study in Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle