This week was the 150th anniversary of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birth on February 7, 1867, and the 60th anniversary of her death on February 10, 1957. I’m a few days late, but I couldn’t let both dates pass by without acknowledging them.

That’s because I owe Laura Ingalls Wilder an enormous debt of gratitude. She is the author of the Little House books that I devoured as a child and that had a lot to do with shaping who I am today.

But this is not a book blog. It’s a travel blog, and you would do well to wonder what the connection is between the books I read as a little girl and the travelling I do today. It’s quite simple, really. The Little House books ignited my fascination with the past and made me the history geek that I am today. And I think I’ve mentioned once or twice on this blog how it is my interest in history that often dictates where I go or what I’m interested in seeing when I’m off on walkabout.

So that’s the connection. Like I said: simple.

I was introduced to the Little House books by family friends from Iowa. (Like Laura, I also spent part of my childhood living in the American Midwest.) For the first few years after our move to Canada, these friends would send my sisters and me a birthday box. (My two sisters and I share a birth month.) Inside that box one year, along with socks that were far too small, were two books: Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. I claimed one, my sister took the other, and my future as a lifelong booklover and history geek was sealed.

My mother used to tell us how, when we lived in Iowa, she could feed us kids platefuls of buttered corn on the cob for dinner and nothing but and we would eat it all. Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family lived in Iowa for a short time and so, based on that shared connection, here is a photo of Iowa corn, taken on the same farm where the family who introduced me to her books lived. I visited those friends with my parents some years ago, giving me the unique opportunity to reflect as an adult on what living in that community must have been like for my Canadian parents.

For the record: those stalks of corn are almost half as tall as me again. Which puts them at about ten feet high.

Now that’s fertile country. Corn Belt, indeed.