Aw, she deserves it. This is not, however, to say that my tingling prairie sense was on the fritz. Far from it, the Ingall's nascent corn and oat crops have indeed been destroyed. In typically biblical fashion, black birds are on the move, after the corn and terrifying the children.
Silently, desperately Laura ran at them. She felt as if she were screaming. She beat at the birds with her sunbonnet. They rose swirling on noisy wings and settled again to the corn, before her, behind her, all around her. They swung clinging to the ears, ripping away the husks, swallowing the corn crop. She could do nothing against so many.
Sure, the Ingalls have their petty revenge, shooting and eating the blackbirds (blackbird pie!) but the crops are dunzo. The meager corn they can save is collected at great personal pecking harm. No crop should mean no money for college, but after Ma explains how life sucks and then you die, so deal with it (paraphrasing, slightly) the family decides they can make do by selling the little calf.
So plagues be damned, Mary, her corsets and petticoats (trimmed with Laura's Christmas yarn), union suits and new hand-sewn brown dress with the whalebone stays are going to college!
Even though everyone's been hoping and dreaming and praying to their vengeful god for Mary to go to college, now that she's about to leave home for years (no trips home with laundry at winter break) it's a huge bummer. Plus the little girls will be loosing Ma and Pa for a over a week because they're going with Mary to school and get her all settled in make sure it's not just a front for a blind teenage girl sweatshop or whatever. Never forget this is the wild west we're talking about here.
The night before, they leave, Mary takes one last walk on the slough with Laura, hikes Gracie up on her knee to tell her the story of Grandpa and the panther one last time, and they all get together for a final sad, but stoic, meal of cottage cheese balls with onions and cold creamed peas. Yum? They like it.
In the morning as the wagon carrying Ma, Pa and Mary pulls away from the claim shack, Gracie (who's five and won't see her sister for years (assuming there's not more tragedy in the works)) has the unladylike temerity to start crying. The little brute. Unfortunately, Laura's been brainwashed enough to say, "For shame, Grace! For shame! a big girl like you crying!
Don't you think it's weird how they're all being raised to show no emotions? An Ingalls can't laugh, cry when her sister leaves, allow her voice to go unmodulated, or get excited, upset, or mad about anything. I've been simultaneously reading Little Women for the past week, which is set around the same time as the Little House books, and those little women get excited all the time. Sure they aren't allowed to get mad, or imodest or be petty either, but Jo's allowed to be tom-boyish in a way that Laura's never allowed to. And the little women live in a city and circulate in society with calling cards and three button gloves. Laura's out on the rough prairie doing piece work and baling hay. My point? As always, is that Ma needs to chill with the "beating the joy out of life" parenting style. Just let the kids be little heathens already.
Anyway, bye Mary! I'll miss your, uh, stalwart goodness and the um, perfect little stitches you make in all your sewing. I'm glad to see you going from a metaphor for all the heartache that can, has, and will befall the Ingalls, to a metaphor for what can go right with a can do spirit and a calf to sell. Oh, and check out Mary's weirdo 19th century blind young lady course of study; political economy (which, what is that? Does anybody know?), literature, higher mathematics, sewing, knitting, bead work, and music. Minus the math and possibly the political economy, depending on what that is, it sounds pretty good huh?
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5 comments:
Well, hell's bells, if you're five and still crying, I don't know what to do with you. Those pesky emotions should be left behind in the utero!
Okay Missy, with this one you not only made me laugh, but THINK too...comparing and contrasting ma's and marmee's parenting styles??? What the what???? So very true what you say...those March girls were allowed to be free in a thoreau like way the poor ingalls could never imagine! Wow, my pore lil mind is blown...
I just "loved" the part where Ma is struggling to get Mary in a corset...is your daughter's middle so important that her body needs to be strangled? Ma also tells Laura constantly that she should wear a corset always, even when asleep.
I know I wanted to fit that in somewhere, there's been a lot of weird corset talk in this book. Maybe I'll do a whole mini post on it!
I'm not exactly sure all the course work Mary did, but she did end up with a Bachelor's degree. Yes, I always assumed that it was the equivalent of Queen's Academy in Anne of Green Gables, but it was an actual college education.
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