1) Smiling. The woman was always smiling. I think she might have smiled through labor in the back of a wagon if they'd taken the camera in there. She always pulled off Beautiful Indignance. I don't remember any Irrational Crabbiness.
2) Warm Voice. I think she sounded tender even when she was calico-whippingly mad. There was no like, "Girls, supper's ready so go wash your hands at the well and get Carry off the roof and tell Albert to stop slapping that mule's butt. Right now. I mean it. Girls? Girls! Right now! . . . I don't care if the water basin's frozen and Carrie thinks she can fly and the mule stepped on Laura's home-grown fledgling okra plant, wash your damn hands." Nope. Just, "Supper's ready girls" and then they all came down the ladder like a little calico waterfall and sat at the table with their gi-normous wooden stew-eating spoons. And closed their eyes when they prayed.
3) Always Thankful for Charles. I mean, with the tight, pocket-less pants how could she have concentrated long enough to get mad about the mud he must had drug into the kitchen with his boots?
4) Maintaining a Reputation for Kindness While Seriously Hating Mrs. Olsen. I feel like I'm at risk of losing my reputation for decency all the time if people find out how much I hate the constant line of Mrs. Olsen's who seem to drip through my parenting life declaring their children's perfection and my children's, um, wild averageness. Yes. Go ahead and say it. You don't think of me as somebody who HAS reputation for decency. I knew it. See?
5) Bottom line: always pretty. Sorry, but even when her hair was in that lame-ice-skating competitor bun and she had just tilled a field behind a mule, she was striking, as I remember. Lovely.
(Though I have to say there's nothing like a quick Google Images search to really ruin a perfectly good reflection on a 70's family show and the use of the word lovely.)
But there are these things we do share:
1) Enough food in the house. Usually. Even when Doc drops by after tending to Old Man Whoever and his gout/croup/weepy leg the stew can be thinned a little if another friend shows up (though I don't particularly remember the episode where she slopped off to the well for water to thin the stew).
2) A penchant for cooking in cast iron. After this last camping trip, I am sure that if I set up a tripod in my fireplace I would enjoy making dinner every night WAY more than I do right now.
3) A readiness to love whoever shows up. I don't mean in that extra-place-setting-for-dinner sort of way that I mentioned above. I mean in the adopt-Albert sort of way. I think Caroline had it right when she said things to Charles like, "Charles, the Good Lord has given us the boy." Okay, so she never said that, but don't you remember how ready she seemed? Okay, I'm not as ready as she is. But I'd say I want to live like that.
Well, now I have fallen into sentimental reflective blather. And now you know that I've always wanted to be Caroline Ingalls. Don't lie, you wanted to be Carol or Ginger or Maryann or Daphne or that sarcastic red-headed lady that was Valerie Bertonelli's mom. Or Hot Lips Hoolihan. That's who you wanted to be, huh?
