I love Laura’s joy when she comes home from the Brewster School for the first time - I love appreciating her loving, cheerful, practical family in a way that even she herself has never appreciated it before, and her own sober realization about how lucky she is. He is Almanzo… I guess it’s because we just seem to belong together.” She means that. Late in the book when Mary asks her, “Do you really want to leave home to marry that Wilder boy?” Laura protests, “He isn’t that Wilder boy any more, Mary. And Laura really takes her time figuring out whether or not they are right for each other (Almanzo seems pretty sure all along).
He is so patient and so determined, and in some way, though he’s the older and more worldly of the two of them, he’s more shy. I love Laura and Almanzo’s courtship (which is really what this book is about). On our last day in South Dakota we drove all around the lakes – Spirit Lake and Lakes Thompson and Henry – and out to the former tree claim where Laura and Almanzo’s first home was, and so in reading this book I was able to take a little nostalgia trip of my own, following the paths of their buggy rides. I read this after visiting De Smet, and it was so lovely to be able to fix this unabashedly romantic YA novel firmly in its real-life location.
It's the last proper Little House book ("The First Four Years" doesn't count as far as I'm concerned!) and everyone is growing up or growing old and it's that moment of change from child/teen to adult, dependence to independence that makes it so poignant. She's a woman who knows she's loved and loves back wholeheartedly.īut the book is also bittersweet. The times spent with friends and family, and happy teaching experiences for Laura are also lovely to read. Almanzo's persistence in courting Laura, and the fact that he collected her every week in freezing winter weather from the first school she taught is beautiful.
The book makes me happy inside, the gentle way that Laura and Almanzo become a couple and go out on rides together. It seemed eminently suitable to read before my own marriage. The reason for this? I think that "These Happy Golden Years" is the first book that I ever read in which a courtship and marriage was described in any detail - I was probably 8 or 9 on first reading of it. This is the book I read the night before I got married ten years ago.
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