Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend

Just kidding! Ingalls' work all day, every day for the pure love of continued survival. (Until they build a church in town, then they can take Sunday morning off!) But there'll be no more blissful pre-dawn cow milking, and twirling around wishing The Sound of Music came out earlier so she could sing "The Prairie is Alive With the Sound of Music". Laura's joining the ranks of wage slavery. Now, if you like your job, you're very lucky (and I also don't believe you) but Laura's going to be like the rest of us poor suckers, walking 10 miles to work before the sun rises to do piece work in a 19th century dry goods store. Metaphorically speaking.

Mr.Clancy, who owns the dry goods store in town, told Pa about this genius idea he had to make shirts for all the lonely, homesteading, bachelors who have neither wife nor blind daughter to sew for them at home. Then when Clancy says he needs a little child laborer to help out, Pa says he couldn't find a better 14 year old than Laura. (Sorry, that came out a little dirtier than I planned). Personally, I thought that was kind of a dick move on Pa's part because he knows just as well as you and I do that Laura hates the town (which she calls a "sore on the beautiful wild prairie"), sewing, and staying inside all day. She actually hates these things to the point that if this was a modern novel I'd assume I was supposed to infer some closeted lesbianism.

Just saying.

Pa's willing to trade on Laura's love of all things Ingalls, and guilt over her blind sister, because sewing shirts for the lonely, and rough bachelors of the town pays a shiny quarter per day, PLUS a meal. We're talking six dollars a month people, and Pa's financial planning hasn't exactly put them in a position to turn down that kind of dough. I actually got a mini tear in my eye when earlier it came out that the only meat Gracie, who's five, has ever had was scraps of that disgusting salted pork fat. Do you know what that means? That's right, she's never gotten to enjoy a roasted pig's tail at slaughter time, one of the great pleasures of (olde tyme) childhood. Poor thing.

Working, as you already know, sucks. Laura works under Mrs. White, Mr. Clancy's mother-in-law, who wrangles the shirts through the new fangled sewing machine after Laura bastes them in place. Laura, though always impeccably respectful, obviously thinks Mrs. White is a huge bitch. She even called Mr. Clancy a "shanty Irishman" right to his face. Oh snap! The only break Laura gets all day is lunch. And you guessed it, lunch sucks too because every member of the dry goods family is horrible. The kids are all dirty and squirmy and everyone screams at each other and jams food in their mouths, and Laura just isn't used to that kind of behavior. The less civilized the locale, the more desperately important manners are to Ma.

At noon, [Laura] knew, great white cloud-puffs would be sailing in the sparkling blue. Their shadows would drift across blowing grasses and fluttering roses. But at noon she would be in the noisy kitchen.

Many of you have told me that this is your favorite book and that I'm going to super enjoy it too, so I'm going to go ahead and keep an open mind. I will say that the frontier town of DeSmet is a lot more exciting than the established, but grasshopper plagued, town of Walnut Grove. Though I think we all wish there could be a little more Nellie Olson. I was however, pleasantly surprised to see Laura abandon her sewing and fall down laughing while she watched two drunk strangers stagger down Main Street singing sailor songs, declaring their drunkenness, and kicking out everyone's screen doors. I was not surprised to see that Ma doesn't approve of finding drunk men funny. Of course, Ma doesn't approve of finding many things funny, earlier she came out against puns. I blame Pa. For what? For everything.