Daily Tasks Are Not Small Things

"Doing up cut fingers, kissing hurt places, and singing bedtime songs are

small things by themselves; but they will inculcate a love for home and family

that will last through life and help to keep America a land of homes."

Old-Fashioned Chicken 'n' Dumplings

"The days are just filled with little things,

and I'm so tired of doing them," wailed a friend recently.

Since then I've been thinking about little things or

these things we are in the habit of thinking small, although

I am sure our judgment is often at fault when we do so.

Working in the garden; taking care of the poultry, calves, and lambs;

milking the cows; and all the other chores that fall to the lot of farm women

may each appear small in itself; but the results go a long way in helping to,

"feed the world." Sometimes I try to imagine the people who will eat the eggs

I gather or the butter from my cream and who will wear the clothes made

from the wool of the lambs I help to raise.

Doing up cut fingers, kissing hurt places, and singing bedtime songs are

small things by themselves; but they will inculcate a love for home and family

that will last through life and help to keep America a land of homes.

Putting up the school lunch for children or cooking a good meal for the

family may seem very insignificant tasks as compared with giving a lecture,

writing a book, or doing other things that have a larger audience; but I doubt

very much if, in the ultimate reckoning, they will count for as much.

If when cooking you will think of yourselves as the chemist that you are,

combining different ingredients into a food that will properly nourish human bodies,

then the work takes on a dignity and an interest. And surely a family well

nourished with healthful food so that boys and girls grow up strong and beautiful,

while their elders reach a hale old age, is no small thing.

It belittles us to think of our daily tasks as small things, and if we continue

to do so, it will in time make us small.  It will narrow our horizon and make our

work just drudgery.  There are so many little things that are really very great, and

when we learn to look beyond the insignificant appearing acts themselves to their

far reaching consequences, we will, "despise not the day of small things."

We will feel an added dignity and poise from the fact that our everyday

round of duties is as important as any other part of the work of the world.

And just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the

whole garment, so women's work at home, while only the doing of little things,

is like the golden gleam of sunlight that runs through 

and brightens all the fabric of civilization.

The Wilder Farmhouse at Rocky Ridge

Mansfield, Missouri

"Daily Tasks Are Not Small Things"

 By Laura Ingalls Wilder

(May 1923)

An essay in living from the book,

"Little House In The Ozarks"

A Laura Ingalls Wilder Sampler

The Rediscovered Writings

 By Laura Ingalls Wilder

(1867-1957)

Edited by Stephen W. Hines

(1991 Guideposts Edition)