Free The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure Page A

thinner—though really, it wasn’t cream anymore—and there were mounds of thick, curdlike stuff that was yellow, a pale but unmistakable yellow. The taste confirmed it: in the amount of time that it took for an hour-long TV show plot to thicken—about twenty-five minutes, including commercials—I had made butter. I felt like a genius and a complete idiot at the same time.
    Churning, it turned out, was the easy part: it was much more tedious and awkward to press all the buttermilk out, rinse it, salt it, and mold it. I had to press a spoon hard against the butter while keeping the bowl it was in tilted far enough to let the buttermilk run. By the time I was finished I’d made nearly two pounds of butter from two quarts of whipping cream. Of course, I’d also wound up with butter that cost almost twice as much as supermarket butter, not counting labor. Only about an hour and a half of labor, but still.
    Chris called at lunchtime to ask how the butter making was going. “Oh, it’s done ,” I said breezily.
    â€œHow does it taste?” he asked. “Compared to store-bought butter?”
    I thought about it. “Exactly the same,” I told him. I even took my new butter out of the fridge and sampled it again while I was on the phone.
    Yes—the taste was good, but no different from the butter that came from the store. Maybe it had something to do with the cream, which was supermarket cream, after all, but for the most part, butter was butter. It was a little disappointing and yet comforting, too, to know that it had such a universal essence. Still, most people were convinced that hand-churned butter had to be better.
    â€œI bet it’s incredible ,” friends would say. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
    Not really, I always tried to tell them. It was just butter. I felt a strange pride at this. I own a butter churn, I thought. You want to make something of it? Butter wasn’t even the point.

    But nothing in Laura World was just butter. I knew that, too.
    Whenever my family went on camping trips, I used to imagine that the contents of our campsite—the sleeping bags, the plastic lantern, the little propane stove—were all we owned in the world. When we’d return home to our house in Oak Park, I’d fantasize that we were coming to our house for the first time, that we had come to it out of some remarkable good fortune, a marvel like the “wonderful house” that Pa was suddenly one day able to build near Plum Creek. And once the station wagon pulled into the driveway I’d take the first chance I could to run upstairs and gaze at my room, describing its details to myself as if I’d never seen them before: a green-and-white-checked quilt (I might even have called it a “coverlet”) lay on the bed; on the white dresser sat a little wooden jewelry box. For a few moments my room felt enchanted, just from the power of observation I’d borrowed from Laura.
    It was a power I’d come to recognize. Other books I read had an I, a chatty presence who made a point to confide in me. I’d been befriended in my mind by a number of middle-grade novel protagonists, such as Sheila the Great, or else listened to omniscient narrators describe Ramona Quimby’s scrapes. But Laura’s point of view felt unmediated and clear, as if she were right behind my eyes. The story of the Little House books was always a story of looking.

    Everything looks like a wilderness in early March. We were driving through Wisconsin to see Laura’s birthplace outside Pepin—also known as “The Holy City of Pepin,” at least to that Minneapolis guy who believes Laura is God. I couldn’t help but feel the sense of a pilgrimage as well. We were on our first Little House trip at last.
    To get to Pepin from Chicago we had to drive all the way across Wisconsin, cross the Mississippi into Minnesota, and then drive for another hour