From Collected Tarts & Other Indelicacies. Published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2017. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

When we were young girls, my friends Nadine and Patricia and I read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books over and over, but the book that we enjoyed the most was The Long Winter.

There was something, as I recall, about eight feet of snow, living on a potato a day and burning all the furniture for warmth that really put all of those endless interpersonal conflicts with that stuck-up Nellie Oleson into perspective.

The three of us played Little House on the Prairie with our Barbie dolls. Our mothers sewed doll-sized gingham pioneer dresses with coordinating bonnets and aprons—in which Barbie still managed to look hot.

And then one happy Christmas my father built a prairie dollhouse for me, and Nadine and Patricia’s father built a covered wagon for them. I don’t think we came out of the basement for a year. We had tiny oil lamps and dishes. We built Barbie-sized tables and chairs, which we would pile up in the middle of the cabin and happily pretend to burn—for warmth. And of course, in order to cook the potatoes.

Sometimes our dolls would be forced, because of some calamity, to abandon their home and trek across the basement. And then life became still harder for them.

The journey was long, and around about the time they left the carpet and began to make their way across the desolate parquet floor, the Barbies would often have little choice but to eat their last good oxen (at which point Pa would have to pull the covered wagon). Usually they would do this only after they had eaten their beloved donkey, a souvenir from the Athens airport that we believed to be covered in real donkey fur.