Over 40? You’re just getting started! What I learned from Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Checking out at a store a recently, the clerk asked if I qualified for their senior discount. “You have to be at least 55”, she said. After I’d finished flinching (this was the first time I’d been asked that), I proudly told her that no, I didn’t qualify, and that I still had one more year of non-senior-discount life to go. Then last week I was exposed to a different perspective on aging. A girlfriend and I had made the 10-hour drive to De Smet, South Dakota, to experience some parts of my idol Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life. There we were, standing in the Surveyor’s House (one of Laura ‘s...