These "Happy" Golden Years

With a name like, These Happy Golden Years, you might be expecting an uplifting tale. I'll admit I was. I'm sure Laura's just starting this book on a very, very dark note in an effort to make those years seem even more happy and golden by comparison.
She is, after all, brazenly holding Almanzo's hand right there on the cover for everyone to see. How unhappy could those years be?

Let's just dive right in shall we?

The wind kept Laura's thick black woolen veil rippling before her eyes. Her breath was frozen in a patch of frost in the veil, that kept slapping cold and damp against her mouth and nose.

Laura's outside in her good black woolen veil in the middle of the South Dakota winter because Pa's driving her the 12 miles from De Smet to Brewster's settlement to begin her new career as a scrappy, Prairie school teacher. It takes all day to get there (there is four houses) and as soon as they reach Mr. Brewster's claim shack, where Laura will be living,  Pa has to turn right around and go home.

Pa's the emotional center of Laura's life and this will be the first time they'll be apart for more than a day since the dark days after the On the Banks of Plum Creek locust plague when Pa had to hit the road to become an itinerant sharecropper. But in typical stoic Ingalls' style Laura just hops of the sled with all her worldly belongings ("her change of underclothes, her other dress, and her school books") and exchanges a single goodbyes with Pa before he turned the horses around and left. No hug, no hearty handshake, no pat on the back, not even a "see you in three months." She's 15, alone in a strange family's home (shack) so she can work to support her family and bring her sister home from blind college and it's negative a million degrees outside. 15 year old me wouldn't have lasted an hour, but 15 year old me hadn't even faced down death once yet. Laura's made of tougher stuff.

Which is good because, for now anyway, that brief Ingalls goodbye is as good as it gets. The Brewster's house is really just two claim shacks mushed together, covered in Laura's-arm width icicles, and surrounded by the kind of yucky grey snow you get from throwing your dishwater out the door every day. Inside we find that the delightful Mrs. Brewster hasn't done as good a job as Ma of sublimating her rage at being a pioneer woman and expressing herself with thoughtful and frugal housekeeping.

A sullen-looking woman stood by the stove, stirring something in a frying pan. A little boy was hanging on to her skirts and crying. His face was dirty and his nose needed a handkerchief. 

No nose in the Ingalls' house has ever suffered for the lack of a handkerchief. And you wouldn't have to use some ratty old scrap of cloth either, it would be an old scrap of cloth that had been bleached, ironed and meticulously hemmed by Mary's blind fingers. It may even have a decorative border if it had been a Christmas present.

Mrs. Brewster hates Laura from the start. It's pretty obvious that Mr. Brewster forgot to consult his wife before he volunteered their house to lodge the new school teacher. Whoops! As if Mrs. Brewster's pioneer life didn't already suck hard enough, now she's got another mouth to feed, and in order to give Laura even a modicum of privacy her "room" will be the whole other side of the partition. That's half of the claim shack! Sure that means Laura has some room to herself and will even be sleeping on the family's boughten sofa, but that's cold comfort. Especially since there's no stove on this side of the partition. Better wear that woolen veil to sleep too Laura! And stay away from that Mrs. Brewster, she's got it out for you.

Next up the slightly more promising first day of school! But first if you like turn of the century tales of scrappy young girls teaching in rural school houses (and who are we kidding, you'd never be reading this blog if you didn't) I suggest checking out the Pulitzer Prize winner, So Big, by Edna Ferber and Jeanette Walls', Half Broke Horses. They're both totally bad ass!