WALNUT GROVE

Farmer Stan McCone built a couple of sod houses, akin to the Ingallses' first home in Minnesota, on his property near a town made famous by Laura Ingalls, Walnut Grove. We paid $4 each to get into his Sod House on the Prairie and took a trip back in time.

Ten acres of tall-grass prairie stretched into the distance. As Jeff and I followed, the boys ran ahead, popping into doors, peering out the windows of the little sod-brick houses.

The place is a tourist trap, but this was no hands-off museum. Kids, in borrowed calico dresses and pinafores, coonskin caps, leather vests and bush hats, ran amok, immersed in playing olden-days, a game I'd once loved. A group of moms stood around trying to recall the details of each of the Ingallses' Walnut Grove homes. Clearly, their passion for Laura's books drove their vacations that year, as had mine.

McCone and his wife, Virginia, have two soddies on their 40 acres in Sanborn, Minn.

''I just wanted to see what one looked like,'' McCone said as we visited on his porch.

This was a busy Saturday. Our visit coincided with the Wilder pageant and festival in Walnut Grove, 20 miles west.

We pitched our tent at Plum Creek County Park and went for a swim in Laura Lake as a thunderstorm rolled in. We took refuge in the car and went to see the museum, in the old Walnut Grove depot.

As Jeff and I examined photographs and artifacts and read the Ingalls-Wilder timeline, the boys were drawn to the back room, where reruns of the show played on a TV. In the gift shop, kids clamored for calico sunbonnets and cork rifles. By this time, I was beginning to fill in the gaps of Laura's story.

''I lived everything told of in the Little House books,'' I had read her saying in The Iowa Story, by William Anderson, ``but I did not write all the truth.''

As the clouds cleared, we got back in the car and headed north, out of town. Pay attention, I told the boys: This was the path Laura and her sister Mary walked to school.

Again, we pulled into a farm family's driveway; this one marked the Gordons. As we curved around a muddy road, I could see the heads of two sunbonneted girls bobbing through the tall, glistening-wet grass.

While the boys and I waded in Plum Creek, Jeff discovered a path behind the tiny dugout where the Ingalls family spent their first Minnesota winter, described so aptly in By the Banks of Plum Creek.

The sun was getting low; we headed out, prairie on our left, plum groves on our right. The fruit was small and wormy, but these were Laura's plum trees. The prairie was a riot of coneflowers, black-eyed Susans and purple prairie clover. Laura's prairie.

We meandered back to our mud-spattered campsite. We struggled to make a fire with damp wood (Jeff managed in the end), and roasted hot dogs for dinner, despite my vague ideas about campfire johnny cakes and salt pork. We layered on jackets and jeans and joined the caravan to the charming town pageant, which chronicled Laura's days there.

I thought of Ma during the night, as my air mattress slowly lost its lift. How did she agree to be uprooted from field, friends and family by her husband's frontier fever? Where did she sleep, how did she care for her babies and cope with living out of a wagon, when what she truly wanted was a steady home and an education for her girls?

After flapjacks at Nellie's Cafe in town, we headed west.

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