The humidity has let up on us for a few days; today seemed a good day to drive over to the nearby berry patch and pick a few blueberries for blueberry crisp. So I piled Kipp and his neighbor friend, Riley, into the car and off we drove, only to discover that the berry patch is not open on Mondays. Whoops. Should have checked.
Plan B. Drive to the Little House in the Big Woods historic site and check out the replica cabin of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthsite. Last night when Kipp came home from his grandma’s, he thrust a paperback copy of Little House into my hands and I decided now was as good a time as any to begin reading the tales to him and just as good a time to give his imagination a little jump start, by a visit to the log cabin.
While Kipp’s mind was blown away by the thought that anyone could live in such a small, square space with no bathrooms, I was caught up with my own thoughts on domestic work, on the way in which reading done in the dead of night, works its way into the day, thoughts turning into action.
As I continued to read Little House in the Big Woods tonight to Kipp, I marveled at how much I had forgotten and at the way in which Ingalls Wilder writes so deliciously of the work involved in keeping a pioneer home; she jumps right into hog butchering too, a subject I can’t seem to escape lately.
This evening, Dean took the boys to a ballgame, and I stayed at home and popped Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers into the DVD player. The film deals with three sisters, two of whom, along with a devoted maid, nurse the third as she dies slowly and painfully from cancer at the age of 37—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg; simmering beneath the surface are all sorts of moral failures and repressed passions, but what struck me, today especially, was the way in which Bergman lingered so slowly over the scenes of caregiving, over this sphere of activity which once belonged almost exclusively to one's intimates and was never farmed out to nursing homes. Although physically taxing and harrowing at times, the act of caring for the dying sister seemed to bring peace as well.
It’s odd how so much art seems to ignore the work of the domestic realm, and yet in one day I run into two excellent, if diverse, examples via Laura Ingalls Wilder and Ingmar Bergman.
12:06:20 PM 
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