All Our Little Women and All Their Prairies

Yesterday was much more chilly and overcast/drizzly than the weather forecast said it would be--in short, a great day to stay inside.  Plus I'm still fighting off a cold, and even though I know intellectually that getting wet and chilled won't give my cold an advantage, on some level, it's a hard folk tale to shake.  Plus, I'm feeling lazy this week.

I have had a yearning to see Little Women for several weeks now--almost any version would do.  My spouse seemed open to possibilities, so after I did some syllabus work with The Great British Baking Show re-runs on in the background, I suggested it.  We watched the superb 2019 version, which I last saw in a movie theatre on a Friday night just before it left town in January of 2020, which I wrote about in this blog post.

There's no need for another review.  I loved the movie yesterday every bit as much as I loved it 5 years ago.  It was great to see it after spending part of the morning prepping for the American Lit survey class I will be teaching (the 2nd half, my favorite half).  It did inspire me to get back in touch with my writer self, who has not gone away but has been doing much more seminary writing and sermon writing in the last few years than poetry writing or fiction writing.

Seeing the movie made me miss all the people I know, women mostly, who have loved this novel/story/movie, and so I made this Facebook post:

"Watching the 2019 version of "Little Women," which makes me want to tell all my female friends and all my creative friends and my childhood self how very much I appreciate and love us all!"

I wish that there had been a similar remake of the Laura Ingalls Wilder material.  I don't count the TV show, although I've grown to appreciate it more as a grown up than I did as the target audience when it aired in the 1970's.  Back then I had read all the books, very recently, and I was shocked by how a weekly TV series deviated from the text.  When I watch now, I'm grateful for the ways that the series stayed faithful to the spirit of the novels.

I think the material would make a great movie.  Or a reality TV show . . . oh, wait, they've done something like that already.  I remember watching the PBS show about Frontier Valley (Frontier House was the actual name of the show), where three families compete to see who can do the best at living the way pioneers would have lived in Montana in the 1870's (give or take a decade).  They were there in the summer, and it looked idyllic.  The conclusion of the series ascertained that they all would have died because they hadn't chopped and stored enough wood to get through the winter.  Sobering.  And even more sobering to realize that most pioneers died or went back east--life was just too hard, even if the opportunity seemed great before the pioneers set out.

I finished the day by working on the annual report that faculty have to do each year at Spartanburg Methodist College, an interesting task after spending the afternoon watching Little Women and sewing small scraps of fabric into larger strips for a quilt.  There must be a metaphor here, or a poem percolating.  Stay Tuned!