Historical Coincidence?

My mother was an elementary school teacher the last sixteen years of her professional life. I remember her talking about reading to her students, many times from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books about “The Little House on the Prairie.” They meant little to me at the time as I didn’t read the books as a youngster   and the TV series was more contemporary with my two sons’ growing up years.

However, when Mom died, I inherited many of her books, among them being the Little House on the Prairie volumes I’m sure many of her young students enjoyed. Being the inquisitive reader I am, I set out to read through the books Mom had collected and after reading them I could understand the interest in the era these books portrayed.

I’m sure Mom was delighted to discover that Laura and her husband actually ended up settling in the southern part of Missouri and I remember that one summer Mom and Dad actually made a trip to Wilder’s home in Mansfield.

While I was in the midst of reading through the Wilder books, my husband and I went to a garage sale here in Elko, Nevada and there in a pile of tattered, disreputable looking books, I discovered a Wilder book not included in Mom’s collection. Farm Boy is actually Laura’s description of Almanzo’s life on an upper New York state farm in the 1870’s as he progresses from age almost-nine to age ten. Her description of farm life in those days is priceless since farm life as I knew it in the 1950’s and 60’s was totally different in the fashion in which work was accomplished.

My reason for reflecting on all this stems from the parallels I see between Almanzo Wilder and my great-grandfather Reber, both of whom came west to Missouri to farm, Wilder to south Missouri, Reber to northeastern Missouri. Contemporaries in age, occupation, and, perhaps, vision. Yet they never met—or perhaps they did?