Little Women and Me - By Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page 0,27

too far away—it was seriously cold out!—I followed in the carriage tracks.

Soon there were more carriages in the street, more people walking in the same direction. At last we all turned a corner and there was …

A strip mall. Well, not a strip mall like back home—there was no Starbucks, no CVS—but there was an obvious string of businesses: a tearoom, a barbershop, a store selling items for women, a general store, the last being the place where my sisters probably did their holiday shopping. Since I wasn’t a man in need of a haircut and since I had no cash to spend, I decided to check out the general store.

There were food items, housewares, there were men’s army boots similar to the ones Jo had bought for Marmee. I picked up one of the boots, studied it from all angles. I’d always thought the boots we wore here were ugly, but you never knew when something was going to become fashionable again in a retro way. Maybe when I got back to the real world, I could win Project Runway with these?

At the sound of voices, I looked up to see a group of older men standing around the counter talking.

“The war has accelerated since the New Year,” one said.

“Since before that,” said another, “since back in July when Major General McClellan took command of the Union Army of the Potomac.”

“How long,” asked a third, “before Lincoln orders an attack on Virginia?”

Attack on Virginia?

That’s when it hit me, really hit me: it was 1862 and I was living in a country that was in the midst of a war. Before now, I suppose I had been aware of the war on some peripheral level—the absence of Papa, Jo’s incessant talk of wishing she could be where the fighting was—but it had never hit me like this. While we were all safe here up north, leading relatively comfortable lives, terrible things were going on down south. So what if this was a fictitious world. The American Civil War was real. The dying was real.

I felt a sudden sense of urgency, spoke without thinking.

“Can’t the Red Cross do anything?” I asked. “People are dying!”

The men looked at me like I was an alien, which, I guess, I was. Maybe the Red Cross hadn’t been invented yet?

“Do?” the first man who had spoken scoffed.

“You’re a girl,” said the second, stating the obvious before snorting.

“You can sew socks,” said the third with a sneer. “That’s all you can do.”

Socks??? I was outraged.

The very idea—that I could do nothing, simply because I was a girl, that it was all above my pretty little head! Didn’t these idiots know that girls could do anything guys could? No, of course they didn’t. In my time, my real time, women were soldiers, fighting right alongside men. But here? I was pretty sure girls weren’t even allowed to vote yet!

Well, what were they doing that was so important and helpful? Standing around a general store and talking?

And yet what could we really do, outside of talking and sewing socks?

I left the store feeling disturbed at my own powerlessness to influence the larger events around me, the men’s mocking laughter following me out the door.

Not ready to go home yet—a new home that felt too safe just now—I walked farther down the street. Soon the shops disappeared, then came a long expanse with nothing, and then …

A church.

But it looked so familiar.

As I stepped closer, I saw a tiny metal plaque nailed to the wall beside the front door. It had a year on it, dating the founding of the church to the days of the American Revolution.

I’d seen that plaque before …

Suddenly, I remembered a much larger church, with a wing for a bigger congregation and administrative offices, a Sunday school, but with this original tiny building still preserved as part of the entrance.

I knew this church!

It stood, or at least in its more modern version, in the town where I lived in my real life, the town I’d grown up in.

Just what the heck was going on here?

Why was I essentially back where I started?

Then the answer came to me: change. Somehow, it all came down to change.

I’d already been altered by my time here, even I could see that. The way I saw the world around me, even the word choices I made—it wasn’t the same as before. But if I was really being changed by this world, what changes was I acting upon it? Surely