The careers of Robert Burns and Laura Ingalls Wilder show that creativity can come at any age. Burns was not yet 30 when he penned the words to his now-famous poem "Auld Lang Syne." It appeared first in a letter to his patron. In a subsequent letter to a friend, he attributed the words to a folk song he'd heard an old man sing. That seems overly modest to me, as Burns often took snippets he'd heard and rendered them into, well, great literature.
This much is true, though: "Auld Lang Syne" was put to a familiar Scottish folk tune, and the result is magic.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, by contrast, didn't write the first of the "Little House on the Prairie" books until she was 65. She was born eight years after Robert Burns, in 1867, to a Midwest farm couple who named their second child Laura. She and her three sisters, Mary, Carrie, and Baby Grace -- along with "good old Jack," their family dog -- would become familiar to several generations of Americans.
It was a scary sound. Laura knew that wolves would eat little girls. But she was safe inside the solid log walls. Her father's gun hung over the door and good old Jack, the brindle bulldog, lay on guard before it. Her father would say, "Go to sleep, Laura. Jack won't let the wolves in." So Laura snuggled under the covers of the trundle bed, close beside Mary, and went to sleep.
That was from Wilder's first book, "Little House in the Big Woods," published in 1932. Readers of subsequent volumes would also become acquainted with Almanzo Wilder, who courted Laura during weekend buggy rides from her job as a schoolteacher to her family's farm.
It seems idyllic the way Laura later described it, riding in a sleigh or buggy pulled by Almanzo's matched horses, Lady and Prince, the young farmer courting the beautiful teacher slowly and patiently.
Patience was required on the American frontier, however, along with emotional resilience. Laura's only brother died before his first birthday. Blizzards left them stranded for weeks; one year, grasshoppers ravaged the farm. In search of stability and success, her family moved between Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kansas.
After she married and left home, Laura faced her own trials in making a life with Almanzo, including the loss of their only son, who died immediately after being born. After losing one farmhouse to fire and a season's crops to drought, they settled at Rocky Ridge Farm, near the town of Mansfield, Missouri, where they raised Rose, their only surviving child.
This girl grew up to have an extraordinary life, including stints as a California real estate agent, San Francisco newspaperwoman, Herbert Hoover biographer, and commercially successful short-story writer.
Visiting her parents' Missouri farm in 1930 as the Depression took hold, Rose encouraged her mother to write down the stories of her childhood. A gifted editor, Rose sensed that Americans would be receptive to a tale of how a loving family overcame poverty and hardship. The runaway success of "Little House in the Big Woods" confirmed this judgment and started Laura Ingalls Wilder on the path to literary fame.
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of Auld Lang Syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods…She thought to herself "This is now." She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
