found, between sunrise and sunset...
In Little Town on the Prairie (Chapter 21, "The Madcap Days"), Laura Ingalls Wilder mis-quotes Horace Mann (1796-1859, American education reformer and abolitionist):

Lost, between sunrise and sunset,
One golden hour, set with sixty diamond minutes.
No reward is offered, for it is gone forever.

The actual quote refers to two golden hours being lost:
Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.

I thought about Laura's use of Mann's words today, because I've been procrastinating about a "Little House" project I started ages ago, never seeming to find or make the time to work on it. Today I decided to take the hour after lunch and settle down. Let's see how often I can put that hour to good use!

The project is transcribing all of the LH books and manuscripts. I've done most of the books (for some reason I've repeatedly gotten bored transcribing The Long Winter - must be all that cold and sameness, as if typing isn't "samey" enough), and I have transcriptions of FB, TLW, LTP, THGY manuscripts so far. LHP is such a mess and hard to decipher that it's a challenge to transcribe and has to be done when I feel like (1) concentrating with a magnifying glass and (2) dealing with a headache afterwards.

But today I worked on the SSL manuscript for more than an hour and it was pretty satisfying. Why am I doing this? Because it's so nice to have everything on the computer and to be able to search for words or phrases or names in a hurry - to be able to compare manuscript and published book easily. I usually flip through my set of LH sacrifice books (the set that is by the computer and full of handwritten notes in the margins; they're falling apart from so much use!) to look things up, but if I can't find it easily and know it's in a certain book, it sure is nice to be able to find it without spending too much time on it.

Rose Wilder Lane was a firm believer in copying, and she once recommended to her mother that she transcribe other author's works to get the feel of their words and to learn from them. I haven't found that a single golden hour I've spent transcribing has been wasted, and I hope to remember Horace Mann's words and be more consistent in an effort to get this done and learn something in the process.
- posted by pioneergirl at 3:35 PM