I'm a big believer in Living Books.  You, know, those are books that tell us what we want to know through a compelling, well-written story.  Pagoo by Holling C. Hollings.  Laura Ingalls Wilder's books.  The Elswyth Thane Williamsburg series.

Today, I was chatting with the exterminator who came to kill the carpenter ants I found.  He's a former cattle rancher from the north-central plains, and he got talking about the horrible all-winter blizzard in the winter of 1995-96.  He talked about his cattle drowning, because it was so cold the air couldn't hold any more moisture, and 50 of his cows drowned in their own breath.  (It reminded me of the cows in The Long Winter suffocating in their frozen breath, but he explained that this was a step worse than that.)  Hundreds of thousands of cattle were lost, and few people-- other than those directly affected-- knew about the tragedy.  Tears came to his eyes as he told me about it.

I said I hoped that someone told this story, in the same way that Wilder chronicled The Long Winter, and he said, "I love those books.  I love that she tells all the history in a way that you remember it-- it's not a dry textbook, that you can't remember a word of when you're tested on it.  But when you get to know those characters, the history that happened to them sticks with you."

See, it's not just us crazy homeschoolers who love Living Books.  We all do.

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Posted by FruitfulFamily

I wished you would have prepared me for his cow story. I was smiling until all the cows died. WOW! That sounds almost unbelieveable. Can you imagine anything dying on their own breath. I don't remember the winter of 1995-96 being that bad, but I was in my twenties and newly married, so I guess I wouldn't have noticed. Now I'll have to go and read the Wilder book.

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Posted by henspace

What a great story! It's so true.

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