Twenty Something
No television soundtrack is more deeply embedded in my memory than the opening song for “Little House on the Prairie.” It lilts and skips as the Ingalls girls bound down a prairie hill that feels as wide as childhood itself, the youngest tumbling behind them.
When I hear it, I’m 9 again. No streaming services exist. The beloved NBC drama is in syndication, and a rerun seems to be playing every time you turn on the TV.
More than 40 years after the original series ended, Netflix is introducing “Little House on the Prairie” to a new generation with an adaptation debuting this month. As Americans revisit the Ingalls family, I’ve found myself doing the same.
I’ve begun rewatching the classic TV series in order of episode. Laura Ingalls still charms — eyes shining, braids swinging. Pa still endears — grinning, fiddle in hand.
But there is something — someone — deeper at work here.
Laura is the spark, Pa is the force and Ma is the heart.
In her quiet, steady ways, Ma Ingalls is the emotional center of the show. She is more cautious than her husband, scanning all the risks of frontier life while he dives in headfirst. Many come to fruition: The Ingalls face fire, the Osage Nation, poverty, infant death, typhus.
Ma braves it all. She conveys so much inner strength in small gestures: tucking her chin into the palm of her hand to steel herself, preparing food while she absorbs bad news, lying in bed at night and staring at the ceiling.
You can see her bracing herself — wanting to name her worries, itching to protest — but nodding instead, wordless, eyes welling up, smiling through the doubt.
It is like the Blessed Mother’s fiat. A whispered “yes,” both faithful and fearful. “OK, here we go, ready or not.”
My favorite Scripture verse captures this tension. Luke chronicles Jesus at age 12, lost for three agonizing days and then discovered at the temple.
“Son,” Mary cries out, “why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.”
Jesus responds: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
Luke makes their bafflement clear: “But they did not understand what he said to them.”
Despite this confusion, the Holy Family moves forward — reunited, returning home. Luke gives us a mundane summary of events followed by a profound emotional observation: “He went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart.”
This is a mother who will not sleep, who will hold “all these things” up to the moonlight, turning them again and again for new meaning, keeping them in her heart, the only place she can. A mother who will hold on despite uncertainty, who is silent and steady.
There is something holy in this, in bearing witness and not having any other recourse than to hold these things in one’s heart. Maybe that’s what we mean, nearly two millenniums after Luke wrote his Gospel, when we find ourselves saying, “my heart is heavy”: It is holding “all these things.”
There is nothing else to do. Nowhere else to turn. Nothing more to say. It is unsettled, but life must go on, so I’m folding these tender wounds and question marks into my heart.
We may not travel by covered wagon, but none of us can avoid trials. And when they arise, we must trust that God will do something in our stretched-out hearts, in our trying to hold it all.
When our hearts are heaviest, God’s hand is upon them. We take the next step.
Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Grey Cloud Island, Minnesota.