Two of the strongest words in the English language are: 

I can. 

You can. 

We can. 

Laura Ingalls Wilder books and television series echoes those words. I love, love, love them, and I love them more as a writer today. I watched a documentary on PBS and it is noted that Laura and Mary would go on walks daily after Mary lost her sight from scarlet fever. 

Laura eyes became Mary’s, and Laura brought the worlds’ colors and textures to life. This was the beginning of Laura’s writing life, before she started writing.

In Little House on the Prairie, Wilder writes:

“Laura couldn’t wait to see the inside of the house. As soon as the tall hole was cut, she ran inside. Everything was striped there. Stripes of sunshine through the cracks in the west wall, and stripes came down from the poles overhead. The stripes of shade and sunshine were all across Laura’s hands and her arms and her bare feet. And through the cracks between the logs she could see stripes of prairie. The sweet smell of the prairie mixed with the sweet smell of cut wood. 

Then, as Pa cut away the logs to make the window hole in the west wall, chunks of sunshine came in. When he finished, a big block of sunshine lay in the ground inside the house.

Ma cooked a good supper because they had company. 

There were stewed Jack rabbit with white flour dumplings and plenty of gravy. There was a steaming-hot, thick cornbread flavored with bacon fat. There were molasses to eat on the cornbread, but because this was a company supper they did not sweeten their coffee with molasses. Ma brought out the little paper sack of pale-brown store sugar” (64-65). 

• 

Thinking –

I was walking and I realized the last time I was hospitalized was nearly the same dates as the first time: 

8/13/77 – 8/24/77

And then, 

8/13/19 – 8/26/19 

Same place. Different room, different time, different faces. Same over arching goal – 

And being so little back then, I knew innately what one must do. 

Our setbacks show us, teach us the way. Mary and Laura and their whole family had many, many setbacks. There are the obvious and there are the less obvious in their lives as well as our present-day lives.

The wayward uneven feeling beneath our feet. The times when we question, ponder, lose our grip, and sometimes scream. The scream can be silence, or a stubborn pout, a stomping of our feet, and many other emotions of all kinds, stretching our days and nights. 

It feels as if we are slowing down or standing still, or both. 

Setbacks. Show us, 

teach us, give us, our ability to 

place our weary feet down, 

again on solid, firm ground. 

It may hurt or sting at first,

more we walk, the more we can,

we give our feet permission to please 

keep moving ahead. 

Setbacks show us who we are. And we often remember them as marked gravity in time.

The need to create the life we want is here. Make it visible and real. 

The lump of butter melts and sinks soaking the sweet grains down deep. It soothes the tough edges of each waffle square. The fork holds the waffle in place for the first cut. The butter grease slides the knife’s teeth back and forth, loosing the grains, stretching the very last one with ease. 

Much love. Many blessings and Happy New Year!