the little house

(I don't know how objective I can be about this next book because I love it. But I will do my best.)

"The Little House," by Virginia Lee Burton is a classic. Originally published in 1942 (do I own any contemporary children's literature? ), this tale generally holds up well to the modern reader's scrutiny. The illustrations are both stylized and homey, as well as colorful, and the time lapse aspect of their presentation reminds me of before/after makeover pictures, and I simply adore those.

But I am getting ahead of myself. It's what happens when you hear the little whimpers and stirrings coming from a napping infant.

"Once upon a time," the story begins tritely, but accurately, "there was a Little House way out in the country." As with many children's tales, the house is a character with feelings and gender. She's a girl. And she's pink. But she is also "strong and well built." We can let the "well built" moniker slide as she is, after all, a house. Not a brick sh*thouse, but a lovely little family dwelling.

She is a happy house, in tune with her surroundings, watching the days go by, the only unchanging thing in mother nature's subtly chaotic world. Apparently, houses never sleep, as she watches the moon and the stars and the lights of the city off in the distance. Like many country girls, she wonders what the big city is like.

Eventually, as she could not go to industrialization, industrialization came to her. Nowadays, we call this "sprawl." The machines came and cut a big road through her little hill covered in daisies. She was deflowered.

It's a lesson in "Be careful what you wish for." Instead of watching cows and birds and the glorious changes of the seasons, she watched trucks and automobiles and their inevitable counterparts: gas stations, houses, and roadside stands. It's a rather prescient look at what has happened all over America. The cars in the drawings are from the 1920's, but the story is the same: humans tend to mess things up. We just don't know when to stop.

Eventually, the city engulfs the Little House, pushing her inhabitants out, and she sits derelict, a lonely little socialist oasis in the middle of squalid capitalism. The city continues to grow, its expanding human life creating larger transportation systems and pollution, and the seasons are gone. "It all seemed about the same" to the Little House.
She was used up. Windows broken, paint cracked and dirty, shutters hanging crookedly. She was the old prostitute on the corner, ignored by johns, mocked by the younger recruits who did not see their own futures in the crone next to them.

But her spirit was unbroken. Underneath her shabby exterior, she as a strong and sturdy as ever.

In an unlikely twist that we must grant to a work of fiction, the great-great-granddaughter of the man who built the Little House happens by and recognizes her, and they take her home to live in her. She was moved out of the city to a new little hill, tarted with some new pink lacquer, ready to start the mad cycle all over. She had learned her lesson. Country better than City. She would never be curious again.

I suppose it's a happy ending.