Photo Week #9

I think this is supposed to be Photo Week #11. I originally labeled this as Photo Week #10 but then I went and counted the weeks and if I want the New Year to be the 52nd week, then this should be number 11. I think.

Oh no, I went back and counted.. and I went the wrong direction. This should be #9.

This is right. My birthday will fall in the 26th week, marking the halfway point of the year, and the second half of 2020 can proceed accordingly.

I didn’t take any meaningful photos this week. I took a photo of the new pair of barre sticky socks I bought myself, but that’s about it. (If I take more barre classes I have the feeling I might have the urge to buy more… they are so cute and actually do help during class.)

This past week, I read 8/9 of the Little House on the Prairie books because they were all available to borrow immediately on my library app and I needed something to read during work. I was reminded how much I used to like these stories, but I read them a lot differently now than I did back then. I didn’t realize there was so much anti-government rhetoric (clearly siding with pioneers and farmers) and racism towards Native Americans. And in one book there is even a “minstrel show” where members of the town are in blackface and it’s the highlight of their year.

And that just brings up the old question of whether or not these books should get a pass because they were written in a time where all of that was totally normal, or if we should stop glorifying these books. (Or do kids even read this in school anymore? We read Little House in the Big Woods in elementary school and then got to go on a field trip to a one-room schoolhouse afterwards.) It is an accurate and educational description of the way that people lived back then – their survival during hard winters, the food they had to prepare, all the sewing they had to do by hand. I remember being obsessed with the fact that in one period of their lives, the Ingalls lived in a dugout by a creek – a house that was carved out of and built into the tall bank of mud and dirt. I would drape a big blanket over our dining table and climb into my “dugout” and then run around on top of the table because that’s where the road would have been.

Also, at one point Laura Ingalls’ to-be-husband asks her if she’s for “women’s rights” and she flat out says no, she doesn’t want to vote. It makes me wonder if I go back and read other children’s books I used to like, if I would feel the same sort of unsettling feeling, or if there are some books that are just timeless. Like will I read Anne of Green Gables and feel like she’s a loser? (I know I’m a hopeless romantic when it comes to these books – and I have also always wondered how my family ended up with the whole set of these books at home, haha.)

Maybe we should just be mindful of how we discuss books and series like this and take the good with the bad. But at one point, shouldn’t one side outweigh the other? I don’t know if there is anything that is a true neutral – which reminds me of Mindy St. Claire in the medium place. Hopefully I will learn to have more discernment…