Pa and Ma and Grace were ready for church when she came out of the bedroom, with Carrie following her. Pa looked from the top of Laura’s head to the bottom of the brown poplin flounce, where the soft black toes of her shoes peeped out. . . . Then Carrie said, “When I’m a young lady, I’m going to earn me a dress just exactly like that.” “Likely you’ll have a prettier one,” Laura answered quickly, but she was startled. She had not thought that she was a young lady. Of course she was, with her hair done up and her skirts almost touching the ground. She was not sure she liked being a young lady.

I suppose this was a major coming of age for girls in previous generations. At Meadow Farm, Pamela always says that sixteen was the age when “the skirts went down and the hair went up.” This meant one was a young lady and eligible for courting. Laura went for her first buggy ride with Almanzo the afternoon she wore the brown poplin dress for the first time. They were engaged that summer. She was sixteen. She married Almanzo the following year.

The idea of teaching school at age fifteen amazes me. I think I could have done it, but it’s such a strange thought. Stranger still is the idea of being engaged my age, and to a man five years older than I. Laura never even considered anyone else, from what she writes. She went on buggy rides with Almanzo that summer and let him kiss her only after they got engaged.

Such a thing! To wear one’s hair up and suddenly become a wife. It’s hard to tell from Laura’s books how she felt about it. She has my grandmother’s tendency to simply narrate and not worry about the emotional background of things. It is possible they think of their own lives in terms of dishtowels, summers, bonnets, and engagement rings. It is possible they themselves do not consider things like anger and passion and fear to be of much consequence except in relation to these tangible things. I do not know and never will, for their ways of speaking reveal only the physical details. This way of thinking, or at least of expressing one’s thoughts, simplifies things greatly. If Laura just decided to spend the rest of her life with Almanzo and never questioned it, I suppose she did not have a real need for anxiety or joy. Life was there to be progressed through calmly and without making a fuss. It was all right to be worried sometimes, to be nervous about teaching school or wearing a new dress. It just wasn’t supposed to get in the way of the dishtowels and engagement rings. It’s an interesting way of living, but I don’t think I’ll try it.