Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week, as a new adaptation of the iconic series Little House on the Prairie is released on Netflix, we turn to poet Joseph Massey to reflect on the original television show—an ode to family and home that helped him reconnect with his estranged family seven years ago.
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In the spring of 2019, I reconnected with my mother and stepfather after a decade-long estrangement. My life was cracked and misshapen, nearly unrecognizable, after I was ejected from the world of mainstream arts and letters at the peak of the #MeToo movement for boorish behavior when I was a young man. I hoped to reclaim a sense of self that wasn’t fragmented—a sense of home I hadn’t known before but badly needed.
My mother and stepfather grew up in an industrial town outside Philadelphia, and they both worked off and on in factories that once thrived in that region. They came from broken homes, surrounded by other broken homes, and many of their friends and relatives were ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse. They were ravaged, too. Life in a gray refinery town, working in warehouses with constant earplug-piercing levels of noise, would drive anyone insane.
My stepfather loomed as a constant threat. The mood swings were volatile, and all the more so considering that he was six feet, eight inches tall. He didn’t talk; he screamed, and the apartment walls were full of holes from his fists. That’s the world I was raised in—my mother and father divorced when I was 3—and I left as soon as I could, in my late teens, to start a new life far from that place and those people.
