Psyched on the Prairie

These "Happy" Golden Years

2011-11-27T20:06:00.001-08:00

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!

The End of an Era!

2011-09-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

Let's all get together and hold hands, come on, come over here, because this is the last post for Little Town on the Prairie. I can see why so many of you say it's your favorite. There were mice eating Pa's hair while he slept, Mary fulfilling her dream of studying higher mathematics and bead work at the blind school in Iowa, Nellie Oleson looking dumb, and most importantly, Almanzo's horse flesh, which first made us feel funny - down there - on Independence day.

While, I think we can all agree that Laurmanzo is the best thing since fighting over a red hot pig's tail, the sad reality of Prairie is that even though Laura's never been kissed, the end of this book means the end of her childhood. At 15! The frivolity extends no further than name card exchanging and awkward walks home with local heroes.

Really it was over when Mary lost her vision to scarlet fever way back On the (deathly, plague infested) Banks of Plum Creek. Since then there's been a lot of responsibility on poor Laura's malnourished shoulders. It's all come to this...sniff...our girl's leaving home.

Before Almanzo could finish his cutter and take Miss Wilder out for a brisk ride behind his horses some January afternoon, Mr. Boast stopped by the Ingalls' house with his friend Mr. Brewster from the town over. Since there's absolutely nothing else going on for 600 miles they saw Laura reciting Washington's resume and impressively diagramming sentences ("'Scaling yohnder peak' is a participial phrase, adjunct of the pronoun, 'I,' hence adjectival") at the School Exhibition. Brewster liked what he saw and decided, non-existant child labor laws be damned, he wanted Laura for his town's school marm.

This is no day laboring in a sweatshop people. The hamlet of Brewsters Settlement is 12 miles away! That's the equal of approximately 1 million miles on a modern highway. It's too far to come home while school is in session, but they're prepared to offer Laura $40 per term. That's 80 kittens at the top of the market! With that money they can bring Mary home for a visit, and who's heart wouldn't be warmed by that reunion?

So before you know it hands are being shaken, sealing legally binding verbal contracts, and the county superintendent is signing Laura's teaching certificate. When say "before you know it" I mean this all happens in an afternoon, including the recitation of Marc Antony's oration on the death of Caesar. In other news, Laura's making me feel woefully under-educated. On Monday they're coming to pick her up and take her to her new life in a new town. Gulp.

She could not think what it would be to teach school twelve miles away from home, alone among strangers. The less she thought of ti the better, for she must go, and she must meet whatever happened as it came.

That's right girl, think of it as an adventure! Also, don't worry, I both looked at the cover and read the blurb on the back of the next book and like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, there ain't no mountain high enough (or Pairie bleak enough) to keep Laurmanzo apart.

Laurmanzo

2011-08-29T23:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, speak now or forever hold your peace! If you have a better idea than Laurmanzo let me know.

Yes, snuff the lantern and chill the buttermilk, it’s time for romance! Well Laura doesn’t know it’s time for romance. She may be able to diagram the hell out of sentence and recite and unbelievably detailed history of America from memory (and we’re talking George Washington’s early work as a surveyor level of detail here) but our girl is absolutely CLUELESS when it comes boys.

Post mitten-tip there hasn’t been much on the Laurmanzo front. Laura’s had a lot on her plate what with memorizing of our first president’s resume, harvesting hay and adjusting to hoop skirts being back in fashion. Almanzo, I assume, has also been busy brushing his horses and other studly homesteaderish activities.

But Laura wasn't counting on the sexual juggernaut that is the traveling tent revival! Of course she tried to skip it anyway to stay home and study (if she doesn’t become a teacher we’ll never see Mary alive again!) but according to Nellie, “people who don’t go to revival meetings are atheists!” Oh Nellie, now that you’ve been proven at every turn to be Laura’s inferior it’s a lot easier to enjoy your outbursts.

Well we all know Laura loves being religious but hates crowds. Obviously the revival is going to be a struggle. And fear wins.

Chills ran up Laura’s spine and over her scalp. She seemed to feel something rising from all those people, something dark and frightening that grew and grew under that thrashing voice…For on horrible instant Laura imagined that Reverend Brown was the Devil. His eyes had fires in them.

Sufficed to say Laura doesn’t go up to get saved by Reverend Brown. But still high on fear and God, she feels a tug on her sleeve. A tug of DESTINY.

Would Laura mind if Almanzo walked her home? Now Laura’s no sophisticated lady, but she is 15, worked in a sweatshop, and has lived around farm animals long enough to know what’s up. Plus, the mitten tip! But she stalwartly refuses to get what’s going down, even as Ma and Pa exchange a flurry of worried looks. Of course Almanzo's no sophisticate either, flirtily mentioning that this winter’s not as bad as the long winter. You know the one that almost wiped out DeSmet. Que romantico, Wilder.

Even after walking her home every night for a week the closest Laura comes to enjoying herself is when she describes the cigar smell of his coat as a “dashing scent.” (Note to self, start describing scents as dashing.) On another occasion she decides that he has a pleasant laugh - which any girl would admire in a gentleman caller. But look Almanzo, if you want to make this thing happen, you need to play to your strengths, and by strengths, of course, I mean horses.

Finally he lets slip that he’s building a cutter (which I believe is a horse drawn sleigh, but those with horse-sense let me know) and just thinking about it makes Laura feel like she’s “smothering.”

“’I’ll come by sometime in January and maybe you’d like to go for a little spin and see how you like it. Some Saturday, say? Would that suit you?”

Oh yes, it’s ON people! And best of all, “Oh won’t Nellie Oleson be mad!”

Hee!

Back in Olde Tyme Action!

2011-08-02T20:00:00.001-07:00

Oh how I've missed the simple pleasures of the Prairie!

When I picked Little Town on the Prairie up it opened right to a page with the term "lunatic fringe" underlined three times. No, not hippies who blow up half constructed subdivisions, or intense Libertarians who try use pieces of silver to buy milk at the 7-11 because dollars are issued by the Government - Laura's bangs.

Ma on the folly of new-fangled hair styles:

I was only thinking of the time your Aunt Eliza and I combed our hair up over our ears and went to school that way. The teacher called us up front and shamed us before the whole school, for being so unladylike and bold as to let our ears be seen.

Sluts! Poor Ma was shamed so thoroughly that on way to school Laura and Carrie discuss how they've never seen their mother's ears. In their whole hard-scrabble, edge of death, living in a hole in the ground, or surrounded by hostile natives, lives, Ma has never let even a lobe peek out!

It feels so good to be back!!!

Of course then I flipped the page and came right onto this charming little drawing.

And it STILL feels good to be back because you know I love to be horrified by Prairie-time race relations.

Out of respect for the Ingalls I will not describe what happened at the town's "Literary," because yes, one of these gentlemen is Pa in black face. Sigh.

The man is truly the king of poor choices.

Let's see what else is going on? Laura's studying her brains out to become the teacher she never wanted to be. The most fun Laura has all summer is helping Pa with haying. Luckily that's not too strenuous what with the gophers and black birds and various and sundry Prairie blights out to gobble the Ingalls' crops slash spirits.

Studying is made slightly less distasteful with the introduction of a new teacher to replace Almanzo's bitchy sister Eliza Jane. First sign of promise? "On the third day of school, Mr. Owen whipped Willie (brother of Nellie) Oleson."

This is good for a number of reasons.

What's that? You don't care who gets abused in the school house? That's very heartless of you. All you care about is Laurmanzo's (Almanzora's? Suggestions?) love affair - blooming like cholera on the prairie. Patience!

I Coming Back I Swear!

2011-07-27T18:57:00.000-07:00

I hear you, and I double pinky swear I'm coming back. I have the next book by my bed and I'm hoping to come out with some sweet, sweet Almanzo courting soon!

Miss you mean it

PS. Just to prove that I've been working on something for real and not just neglecting you, check out the book I wrote! (which even though it's not coming out till February is somehow already marked down)

Girlish Things

2010-12-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

The school in town is bringing us to familiar ground. Growing up isn't all corsets and voice modulation, even on the frontier there's room for the fads and fancies of the teenage girl. Instead of slam books, lip smackers and drawing a penis on your drunk and passed out friend's face, the girls have autograph books. You use your best handwriting to share a poem, moral homily or bible verse. Just as fun.

Here's what the orphan girl Ida wrote in Laura's autograph book:

In memory's golden casket,

Drop one pearl for me.

Your loving friend,

Ida B. Wright

"In memory's golden casket, drop one pearl for me," is totally the "2 good, 2B, 4 gotten" of the 19th century.

But most important, obviously, boys. BOYS!! There are really only two truly eligible bachelors out on the prairie this year. Obviously, Almanzo Wilder, and also his partner in the grain rescue mission during the Long Winter, Cap Garland. According to Laura, Cap's smile, "flashed quick as lightening and warmer than sunshine." Not a bad thing to be known for, but while Laura appreciates a good smile when she see's one, the real competition for Cap's affections is between stupid Nellie and Laura's rich-girl friend Mary Powers. Actually, it's not really a competition since Mary likes Cap, and Cap likes Mary, but these people have been raised to be so polite that it's practically impossible to get any courting done.

Cap shows up every day at lunch with a little bag of store bought candy for Mary but as soon as he walks in the door Nellie grabs it out of his hand and is all, Oh, swoon! Cappie how did you know I love candy? And aren't you the tallest, strongest and most precious thing that every walked the face of the ....barf. And no one says a thing while she goes ahead and jams the candy down her maw. That just wouldn't be polite.

This happens three days in a row and everyone just glances at each other nervously till finally Laura just grabs the bag out of Nellie's hand (mid "Oo-oo Cappie") and plops it into Mary's. Laura's the hero, Nellie looks a fool and Cap and Mary exchange a relieved glance, which may constitute common law marriage.

Of course afterwards Nellie's all, I didn't want him anyway and, lets the other girls know that, "It's that chum of his I want to know, that young Mr. Wilder with the funny name. You'll see...I'm going riding behind those horses of his."

Yeah well, we'll see who'll be riding behind whose horses so...there! When I say "who'll" of course I mean Laura, and when I say Laura, I mean it actually happens during this post!!!!!

Backtrack. Along with autograph books and burgeoning sexuality, the other big teen fad out on the Prairie this fall is name cards. What? You haven't heard of the paper sensation that's sweeping our newly formed nation? Name cards are these awesome pastel cards with a picture of a flower, or a bunch of flowers, or a bunch of flowers and a bird on one side, and your name on the other.

Pretty awesome huh? Of course, now I want some. They'd be useless though because just having name cards isn't good enough. Everyone has to have some because the fun is in exchanging your name card for a friend's. Back in DeSmet this is complicated by the fact that there's only really 5 girls mature enough for name cards, and to get 12 cards printed cost the astronomical sum of 25 cents. Upity Nellie gets them, of course, and Mary Powers and Minnie Johnson have rich fathers so they'll get them. As an orphan Ida Wright has already been given the gift of a loving Christian home so she can't really ask for anything additional. She'll just enjoy looking at the other girl's cards.

But what about Laura? She knows it's "folly even to think of spending twenty -five cents for mere pleasure." On the other hand, as a teenager, pleasure's the very most important thing to spend money on. Torn, she slyly brings it up at night to Ma and Pa, who wisely intuit that her social life will be ruined if she can't get some of those "new fangled" name cards. I have to say, Ma and Pa have been uncharacteristically cool this book. They picked up Laura's autograph book in Vinton, the town where Mary's school is located, so she could be ahead of the social curve and now they're going to fork over the cash (or single coin) to make a teenage dream come true. Aw.

After a night of beating herself up for wasting the family's money, Laura picks out a nice pink card with roses and cornflowers. And then, OMG when she goes to pick them up it takes too long and now she's running late for school and Ohmygod Ohmygod! who comes riding up to the rescue, but Almanzo! And more importantly, his horses. Would Laura like a ride behind the horses the rest of the way to school?

The funniest thing about the ride was that Almanzo was obviously making the horses go slow to make the trip last longer, and all Laura could think about is how she wishes he'd make them gallop. She's a woman with a need for speed. They exchange name cards (his, manly and plain) and best of all everyone (by which I mean Nellie) sees them pull up to school together. Sees Almanzo help Laura down.

"She barely touched his glove with her mitten tip."

And with that mitten tip, it begins.

Fast Times at DeSmet High

2010-12-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

Operation horse flesh is not going as planned. Bridges to a happy marriage are being burned like a fast moving prairie fire. Miss Wilder (who's finally been unmasked as bossy Eliza Jane) will definitely not be greasing the path to Almanzo's marital bed via his horses. And she's going to make the worst sister in law ever.

Not only did she go ahead and become instant PBFF (Prairie Best Friends Forever) with that horrible Nellie Oleson (meaning she is now Laura's mortal enemy too) she's turning out to be a totally shitty teacher too. Hello, Eliza Jane! Some people are reluctantly trying to get teaching certificates so they can help their blind sisters stay in college here! Get your shit together.

Instead of keeping progeny of the frontier in line so she can jam their heads full of whatever was useful back then, she''s all, I'm going to rule you out of love, not fear. Blech. This kind of I'm okay, you're okay, no one's getting punished, teaching style disgusts the frontier children. They're used to knowing swift punishment is imminent for anything from shedding a tear, to wasting a grain of corn. Of course if they were aware of how many of the teachers from the Wilder's home town who were murdered by their students, they might cut her some slack.

Her incompetence produced one of my favorite moments in any Little House book, despite being almost incomprehensible.

"Birds in their little nests agree," [Miss Wilder] said smiling, and Laura and Ida almost squirmed from embarrassment. Besides, that showed that she knew nothing at all about birds.

Take note: birds in their nests most certainly do not agree.

Miss Wilder's ineptitude has led to all kinds of outrageous misbehaving, from whispering and nudging all the way to seat scuffing. But no matter how many seats are scuffed, no punishments are meted out. Of course with Nellie (who clearly hasn't forgotten Laura's social domination in Walnut Grove) in her ear it's only a matter of time before Laura and Carrie catch some shit.

The way it goes down is really quite sad. See, little Carrie, being an Ingalls, has been through some shit in her life. She had the same scarlet fever that blinded Mary back in Walnut Grove and not being made of the same hearty stock as Laura, never really recovered from last years long winter. She's pale and scrawny, always cold and plagued by headaches. Not condusive to excelling at school, and she, just like I do, sucks at spelling. When Miss Wilder makes her go to the chalk board to copy a word she misspelled 50 times, she almost keels over, all grey and sweaty. When Laura saves her, Miss Wilder gets pissed and makes Laura finish for her. So unfair!

After that it's all out war in the school house, culminating in Miss Wilder sending Laura and Carrie home early from school. Apparently, getting sent home early from school is the worst punishment a student has ever survived. Seriously, the other students act like they're headed to the electric chair. But Miss Wilder and Nellie Oleson didn't bank on the fact that everyone loves Laura, including all the boys, and life at school descends into pandemonium. Miss Wilder's ruler (and only means of discipline) is stolen, funny faces are made, spitballs are launched and the aisles are in a constant state of being scampered down.

Even Nellie can feel which way the wind is blowing and lets the other girls know that Miss Wilder's greatest humiliation was getting lice from a "dirty girl" when she was a student. Aw! And the other up state New York students called her "Lazy, lousy, Lizy Jane" from there on out - possibly forcing her to move 1,000 miles away from home to teach out on the Dakota prairie. That's speculation.

Before you know it absolutely no learning is going on in the school house, which is bad news for Laura, and everyone's singing an impossibly mean song (which Laura "accidentally" composed) that incorporates the hated nickname. Also bad for Laura who feels bad about the song, but would still totally beat up Lousy Lizy if given the chance.

When word of the whole mess gets back to Pa, who's on the school board, he manfully takes over, shutting down the insurrection by merely showing up at school and telling everyone to cut it out already. At home he tries to get to the bottom of why Miss Wilder blamed everything on Laura and Carrie. You and I know it was that manipulative bitch Nellie but there's always some way Laura could be acting more virtuously. Like not composing catchy but slanderous songs, but Pa never got wind of that. Pa closes the subject with the confusing warning, "a dog that will fetch a bone will carry a bone."

What? I think it has something to do with gossip, but I'm not sure. Is the dog Nellie or Laura? Or is Nellie the bone?

A Moment for Unmentionables

2010-12-02T14:44:00.000-08:00

There's a subject I've been meaning to address which I haven't been able to jam it in anywhere so I've just left it out. But one of the commenters, RiverHeightsFangirl brought it up and I agree, the subject of prairie underwear cannot, should not, be ignored.

See, just as day turns into night and neglected fruit will go bad even in the fridge, every girl must one day become a woman. I'm not talking about the traumatic day you get your first period (which I assure you would never be discussed, or even acknowledged in the Little House universe) I'm talking about the mysterious time when you go from having one long braid down your back to putting it up in the German girl braid crown thing. You know what I mean.

Putting your hair up, and wearing a skirt down to your toes (another harbinger of womanhood) are all fine and good. You probably already know that a long braid is in constant danger of getting all tangled up in the 1,000 buttons that go down the back of your dress. But there's a dark side to long dresses and hair putting up in a braid crown. Once the hair goes up and the dress goes down, the corsets goes on.

While I'm aware that women of this time wore corsets, were in fact praised for rearranging their internal organs into the least anatomically correct shape possible, I'd hoped, perhaps, frontier teenagers might be exempt. Especially when you consider that Laura's out there baling the hay, lugging water from the well and clocking hours in an ultimately futile attempt to chase black birds away from the crops with her flapping bonnet. Among other laborious activities. Even the mile walk to school seems difficult, considering.

It goes without saying that Laura hates wearing a corset.

Her corsets were a sad affliction to her, from the time she put them on in the morning until she took them off at night.

A sad affliction people. This is from a girl who has lived through some seriously sad afflictions in her short life. Do you remember the death watch from Little House on the Prairie? The grasshopper plague? The scarlet fever that snatched poor Mary's vision? The entire last book?

Ma, who was a classic 20 inch waister when she was courting Pa, counsels sleeping in your corset at night! I guess so your selfish organs don't migrate back to their original shapes and locations while you sleep. While Laura can't "...bear at night the torment of the steels that would not let her draw a deep breath" Mary dutifully gives up breathing for the waspish figure she can't even see.

Lets all take a deep breath and enjoy the feeling of air entering our lungs!

What in the Prairie!?

2010-12-01T09:55:00.000-08:00

So now that we have our blind daughter off to school and fall is officially here, it's time for Laura and Carrie to go back to the school too. First, I just want to take a moment of silence for the old order of sisters on the prairie. For so long, and so many books it was Mary and Laura, parters in crime...or not crime but at least in their desire to be good and virtuous little girls. Even when Laura hated Mary and her stupid blond curls, even after Mary went blind from the scarlet fever they still took their little slough walks together. Now she's off in Iowa. Sniff.

Sorry, for the unladylike show of emotion.

Anyway, Carrie and Laura hike the mile into to town, and even though Laura's 15, and has spent lots of winters in school, and around people, she's still terrified. I'm glad to know that Laura and Almanzo eventually end up together, otherwise I'd think she was going the way of the crazy claim shack lady. Just saying. Of course the other reason we're going to school is to meet Almanzo's sister (no word on whether it's Eliza Jane or Alice, yet) which will hopefully lead to Laura and Almanzo's beautiful horses sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

But there's two things keeping the K-I-S-S-I-N-G from happening. #1 Laura can't stand Miss Wilder. She panders to the popular girls, and gives some kind of innocuous speech about respecting each other and being unselfish and seeing her as a friend not a cruel task mistress, which I thought was fine but gave Laura the sweats. I guess they all just prefer a harder-line one room school teacher. So I wasn't immediately anti Manzo's sister till #2 happened...Holy shit Nellie Oleson (!!!), from The Banks of Plum Creek, strides right into the school house (late of course) like the perfect bitch she's always been. Of all the frontier towns, in all of the Dakotas, she has to show up in DeSmet. Geez!

In addition to being late and looking irritatingly hot in a polonaise dress with deep pleated ruffles around the neck and sleeves and hem, she demands that the little orphan girl get up so her bitchiness can have the best seat in the school house. And Miss Wilder's all like, get up orphan girl, let the little rich girl have the seat. Stupid Eliza Jane or Alice. Worst of all Nellie activates some of Laura's dormant insecurities.

She had grown taller than Laura, and she was much slimmer. She was willowy, while Laura was still as round and dumpy as a little French horse.

Ugh, that's not good. I've always said that "dumpy" is the one insult I cannot forgive. As you'd expect Nellie acts like she's waaaaaay to good for the frontier, even pretending to be from further east than Minnesota. Please. All the girls are all from "back east," Nellie, it is a 19th century frontier town after all. But while they're all tan and happy, Nellie complains constantly about the prairie sun, making a big deal about not ruining her perfect lily-white skin.

But Pa's got a secret. He gets all the best gossip from town and heard that Mr. Oleson somehow lost all his money in Walnut Grove. Possibly because the town is cursed. Now all he and his uppity daughter have to their name is a claim outside of town. This news cheers Laura up slightly, especially since now that the Ingalls have moved to town for the winter and the Olesons are living out on their claim, the tables are turned. Laura's the town girl now, and Nellie's the country mouse. Oh BURN Nellie!

The biggest problem with Nellie's unfortunate (for Laura, not us, since we love to hate) appearance is that she's got her marrying-up eye on Almanzo's sweet horse flesh too. Laura naively believes that having the best grades in school is going to be enough to get her in good with Almanzo's sister, but Nellie goes right to source and just starts sucking up to her. Which makes her a much more likely candidate for riding behind the horses in Almanzo's wagon. Oh woe!

And just in case you think I'm going overboard with the sexual horse innuendos, let me pass the mic to Laura:

Their glossy shoulders glistened, their black manes and tails blew shining in the wind...Sunlight ran glistening on the curve of their arched necks, straight along their smooth sides and curving again on their round haunches.

That's shortened from two paragraphs on the beauty of the horses' glistening haunches. Well, get to work Laura! Nobody catches a man by getting the best marks in math!

Our Little Blind Girl's All Grown Up!

2010-11-28T19:07:00.000-08:00

After what seems like one million years, and one million setbacks, Mary's finally headed to the college for the blind in Iowa!

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?

Independence Day!

2010-11-12T11:22:00.001-08:00

The hits just keep coming, because DeSmet is going to celebrate my favorite holiday, 4th of July! Not sure if they'll be able to get Bud Lite Lime or red, white and blue bikinis when kitten prices are up to half a dollar...but I'm sure they'll be able to find some way to celebrate.

Well, the brand new town of DeSmet will be celebrating our country's victory over the British regulars, hired Hessians, murdering, scalping red-skinned savages and fine gold-laced aristocrats (I hope it's obvious that these descriptors are from the book, not my brain) with lemonade and horse races! Hey, that actually sounds fun.

Naturally Ma says, "Women are not likely to be at a horse race." But the prairie spring must be agreeing with her because she then gets uncharacteristically cool about letting Laura and Carrie go to town anyway. Go Ma! Way to unclench!

In all the excitement of putting on her union suit, and petticoats, and corset, and calico dress, Laura must have forgotten that she hates going to town. She and Carrie are instantly freaked out when they get there and find that, "Men and boys were so thick on the sidewalk that in places they almost touched each other." So Laura and Carrie decide to hide in Pa's store and people watch from the second floor window until it's time for the horse races - which, I'm still surprised they're allowed to go to. Sounds like some pretty rough frontier fun if you ask me.

But then the reason Laura's allowed to see the races becomes clear...it's a great chance to marvel at Almanzo's manliness. Well Almanzo's horses's manliness. Even though they're pulling the heaviest wagon by far, Manzo still manages to win the race, the purse, and a few confusing crotch throbs from our young heroine. Sigh! The romance plot thickens when Mr. Boast tells the Ingalls that Almanzo's sister will be coming west to teach school. Ah, ha! A socially sanctioned, same-sex in!

"Maybe if I am a very good scholar and if she likes me, maybe she might take me driving behind those beautiful horses."

Oh Laura, you're hardly the first 15 year old girl to transfer her sexual feelings onto a pair of perfectly matched bay horses.

Bad News That's Good News and Good News that Could Turn into Bad News

2010-11-09T17:09:00.000-08:00

You were all right, things are starting to looking up! Laura's been laid off of her sweatshop job now that all the rough bachelors of the prairie have been properly shirted-up for the summer. Of course, even though she hated the job, Laura still finds a way to feel guilty, because leaving now means her salary maxed out at $9. Certainly a small fortune, but it hardly seems like enough money to send anyone to a college for the blind. What a bad, sighted sister.

So getting laid of is either bad news, or good news, considering how selfless you are but there nothing to stop the celebration when Pa shows Laura the 14 little tiny baby chicks the Boast's gave him. [Pa's] whole face was beaming with anticipation of Ma's delight. Aw! All's forgiven, Pa.

For the time being.

Before the warm glow of tiny baby chick ownership can wear off we get even better news-there's enough money to send Mary to college. She's going this very fall! And Laura helped because her $9 are enough to buy all the cloth for a new fancy winter dress and maybe even enough velvet for a hat. That's a lot of child labor for a dress and a hat that you need to make yourself. But...not my universe.

Unfortunately Ma's got my foreshadowing senses tingling when she says that Mary can go to college IF the oat and corn crop bring in as much money as expected and, "nothing goes wrong."As soon as I heard that my first thought was, Oh no what's going to happen to the corn and oat crop?! But only time can tell what fresh horrors mother nature has in store for the scrappy Ingalls. For now the crops are healthy, the garden is full of pumpkins and cucumbers and Mary's going to school.

Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend

2010-11-08T11:10:00.000-08:00

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.

And...We're back!

2010-11-02T19:16:00.000-07:00

I know it's been approximately 700 years, but I'm definitely back in effect, and bringing you all the wholesomeness that can be squeezed out of the Wild West.

As you know, we're finally leaving the long winter of The Long Winter behind and along with it (hopefully) the pioneer-soul-crushing prose. Woo! If for no other reason than that things couldn't possibly get worse, I have high hopes for Little Town on the Prairie. Just look at the cover...

Kittens!!!

Of course this is the cover of The Long Winter, which makes the six harrowing months of starvation, deprivation and chilblains look like the set of a J.Crew Kids photo shoot. For all I know the Ingalls' are just waiting for that kitten to put on a little weight before they hook it up to a plow and whip the mewl out of it.

You never know with these masochists.

But sure enough, Laura makes spring time on the Dakota prairie seem like a little slice of heaven. Full of meadow larks and bright eyed jack rabbits and the fun of teaching the new baby cow how to drink milk out of a pail. But even calf schoolin' can't compare to the excitement of Pa's new fangled plow.

I know, this is HUGE.

It pulls up the sod like a dream (I won't comment on the fact that this kind of farming technique played a part in creating the dust bowl of the 1930's (oh wait, I just did.)) and it's so easy to use that after the day's plowing is done, "Pa was not to tired to joke." See, this book is less soul crushing already! Of course Laura doesn't get a lot of exposure to humor (Ma inexplicably finds jokes of all kinds sinful) so know that when she says "joke," she means mild plow related humor prefaced by Pa's favorite exclamation, "by jingo!"

But the plow's not just a boon for the family and their feeble grasp on comedy, the plow horses are experiencing a big benefit too. Gone are the days of bumming everyone out by getting all "sad and gaunt" during spring planting. Now after they're unhitched, they still have the energy to roll around happily in the dirt for moments at a time.

Most life affirming of all, Ma has taken the little china shepherdess (the symbol for her fragile sanity) out of hiding and placed it back on the little wooden bracket Pa carved in Wisconsin. Before they became itinerant subsistence farmers.

Of course there are still problems for the clan Ingalls. Mary for one, is still blind. On top of that, she works so hard to be good that she keeps twisting herself into a spiritual pretzel, wondering if trying to be good means you secretly aren't. My prediction - Mary's dying a virgin.

Problem two is that the house is overrun with mice. Old testament overrun. To the point where one chewed off a big hunk of Pa's hair while he was sleeping. How freaky is that? Getting that personal with your head means they're totally running all over your body while you sleep with their naked feet. Possibly peeing on your face, who knows.

(I had a mouse in my old apartment who never ate any of my hair but still gave me nightmares when his nocturnal skritching around my apartment invaded my dreams. On the plus side, my building manager told me that the pest control guy thought I had the nicest apartment in the whole building.)

Pest control is where our little fuzzy cover-kitten comes in. I knew it couldn't possibly just be for fun - everyone in the claim shanty works for their homemade bread. Pa paid the outrageous sum of 50 cents for the little guy to stop the forced hair cuts, possible face peeing and general pantry raiding rodents. So that problem's on the way to being bloodily solved but what about Mary? Laura's greatest wish, beyond enjoying the wide open vistas of the prairie, is to get together enough money to send Mary to a school for the blind back east. Well, Pa's got a solution for that too, but it's a bit of a devil's bargain. Laura can earn money working in town (which she consider's one of the inner rings of hell) sewing shirts.

So now friends we have a clue as to how Laura's soul is going to be crushed for the next 300 odd pages. Join me won't you?

I Just Want to Let You Know....

2010-04-27T21:18:00.000-07:00

That I will be back! I kind of talked about it before but I'm weirdly writing a book right now, which you should totally buy in a year and a half by the way, and it's eating my life. You'll like it, it's about scandals of the 20th century AND it's a young adult book.

I thought I could keep up prairie-ing, but I have to take a hiatus for a sec (slash 3 more months) but then I'll be back! So hold tight friends, I'm sure much less dire times are ahead. For everyone. For the love of god, keep me book marked - we'll make it to the end of this series yet.

Miss you, mean it.

Relief and Christmas in May

2010-03-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

Sometime in the night Laura heard the wind. It was still blowing furiously but there were no voices, no howls or shrieks in it. And with it there was another sound, a tiny, uncertain, liquid sound that she could not understand...She sprang up in bed and called aloud, "Pa! Pa! The Chinook is blowing!"

I'm no meteorologist but Chinook = rain and you can't have rain and snow at the same time which means HALLELUJAH the MFing blizzards are done. Go ahead and thank god, but don't get too excited yet. No blizzards is definitely a start; there's green grass and being able to use the whole house instead of huddling around the stove and getting to hang out with non-Ingalls again, which all must be very refreshing. However...we're still facing some issues.

First of all, this is no soft spring rain, DeSmet is experiencing Chinook levels of rain. Like, new lake ecosystems are being formed in the middle of main street, rain. I hate rain. Not as much as 7 months of soul crushing blizzards, but perhaps a close second.

More important than my dislike of being damp, the trains still aren't running. The stupid blizzards picked up all the sod the pioneers so painstakingly broke up, mixed it up with snow and dumped it all over the train tracks. Not just a little either, in some places it's 20 feet deep. So see you later Pa and other townsmen, go dig us out some train and don't come back till you can bring us some potatoes and pork fat.

So, sigh, for the time being we still have no new food, or fuel, which means Ingalls are still spending all day grinding wheat and twisting hay to burn for heat. And there's no new seed wheat so Pa can't plant the new crop and no tar paper or lumber to repair the shanty. Really all we have is the imminent fear of death receding into the horizon. Yay?

But finally, finally on the last day of April (the first blizzard was on the very 1st day of October) the trains come to town! Just when the Ingalls were down to their very last handful of grain. Phew! On the train there's food (thank god because one more coarse grain biscuit and I'll scream) and more excitingly the Christmas barrel! Sent by the very same Preacher who set up the Christmas tree in Walnut Grove. You remember, the little fur cape.
(All Laura gets from this barrel is some embroidery floss but she seems happy so, good for her.)

Now, the Ingalls did have the world's most pathetic Christmas already this year. With their sad little can of oysters, and embroidered cardboard, and reading of religious stories by the button and axle grease lamp. But right in the middle of 'celebrating' one of the worst blizzards yet came through and they already knew they weren't going to have enough food or fuel to last till April which can make it hard to celebrate the birth of your lord. Frankly the whole day was a huge bummer.

Due to bummer Christmas, when the trains come Ma and Pa decide to call an audible and redo the whole thing. They invite the Boasts over, who spent Christmas with them when they were in the Surveyor's cabin, and cook up the big old frozen turkey that was at the bottom of the Christmas barrel. So there's turkey and cranberry jelly and mashed potatoes and coffee and white bread and pie and good lord Mrs. Boast brought butter so what else could you need?!

The real tear jerker comes at the end of the meal. All winter long Pa's hands have been to jacked from the cold and the straw twisting to play the fiddle. Since his fiddle playing is a symbol of well being, safety and family unity this is a big deal. Symbol wise. But at the end of the meal he whips out the old fiddle and plays a song about life being hard that he learned while digging out the rail roads.

A few clear notes softly sounded. The lump in Laura's throat almost choked her.

Don't worry, after the whole long winter she wasn't taken down by suppressed emotion once the sun shined again. So now it's back to the claim for planting and summer time and hopefully some Almanzo courtin' but I'll have to start Little Town on the Prairie to let you know more about that.

Sexy Rescue Pt. 3 - Mr. Loftus and Frostbite are Bitches

2010-03-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

I know Sexy Rescue Pt. 3 doesn't have a very sexy title but the resolution of the town saving is kind of unsavory, you might even say, yucky. Take this for example -

His (Almanzo) feet were bloodless-white and dead to the touch. Royal helped him rub them with snow, in the coldest corner of the room, until they began to tingle with a pain that made his stomach sick. Tired as he was, he could not sleep that night with the feverish pain of his feet.

Not hot, Almanzo. Though I am glad that you won't loose your feet. I'm sure that an 1880's prosthesis is like a potato with a hemp ankle strap and that's going to chafe after 16hrs of farm labor.

So after all that, the 18hour trek into the prairie, digging the horses out of the snow drifts, haggling with the lonely homesteader, and almost loosing all his toes and fingers, Almanzo doesn't even charge Mr. Loftus, the store keeper who fronted the greenbacks for this mission, a hauling charge. So noble, so self sacrificing, so handsome (once his feet heal).

Mr. Loftus on the other hand, not so much. First he's all like, 'A dollar 25 a bushel? That's not an awesome price for the only wheat anywhere within 3 zillion miles of this god forsaken tundra. If I was there I would have driven a much harder bargain.' Shut up dude, or next time you can go riding up to death's door with a burlap sack and your poker face. Geez.
Plus, YOU'RE WELCOME!

Once the blizzard that almost killed Almanzo and Cap blows over, Loftus spreads the word around De Smet that there's wheat and you don't have to die you can just come buy some. Then, in case you forgot what a dick he is, he goes and jacks the price up to 3 bucks a bushel! Not only is that a more than 100% return on his investment, the regular, non-blizzard market price for wheat is 78 cents per bushel. That friends, is what we call price gouging.

Loftus is all, supply and demand suckers, look into it! Didn't you ever take a 100 level econ class? But the townspeople, lacking in higher education, take a 'we'll just go ahead and kill you then' approach to economic theory.

Luckily Pa, even malnourished and dying, can still play the hero. He steps to the front of the hangry (hungry+angry) mob calming them with hand gestures and a soothing tone of voice. Then he lays a big old guilt trip with a side of cause and effect on Loftus. Think about it - if you screw over the townspeople this winter when they don't have a choice, then come spring nobody's going to have anything to do with you or your damn store. Plus they'll still probably kill you.

Chastened and a little scared for his life, Loftus throws up his hands and sells the wheat for his original investment of $1.25 per bushel. Cheers erupt, everyone get's their wheat. Indeed, no one needs to die. Great. The only thing is, there's still only bread to eat for the whole rest of the winter which is like 3 months. And the Ingalls have to grind the wheat all day long with a coffee grinder just to make the bread. Plus there still no coal or wood to burn, and they all have chilblains. Blech.

Boo! End already long winter!

Sexy Rescue Pt. 2 - Sexy Success

2010-03-17T09:35:00.000-07:00

So here we are, frozen snow plains, 40 below, no landmarks in sight. I'd call it Hell, but the weather's inconsistent with that metaphor. Cap and Almanzo are only keeping the blood flowing to their extremities by running along side their horses, and digging them out when they fall through unstable snow banks. You have to be in tip-top farm labor shape to run next to your horse for 6 hours with 50lbs of wool socks on.

They're just like, wandering the empty prairie, hoping to find this house that may or may not even exist. If it wasn't a children’s novel I would have started mourning their all to brief lives about now. Then suddenly! Almanzo's pretty blue eyes pick out a mini smudge of smoke on the horizon. Behold the mythical settler and his life giving barn!

And man, this dude's been holed up on his claim by himself for months and he is fucking PSYCHED to have some company.
'Hello! Hello!' He cried. 'Come in! Come in! Where did you come from? Where are you going? Come in! How long can you stay? Come right in!' He was so excited that he did not wait for answers.

Yeah, he's excited to have someone to serve boiled beans and biscuits to, but he is NOT down to sell his wheat. That's his seed wheat for the spring and he doesn't personally know any malnourished townspersons, so if they starve, well, whatevs. Dude's got wheat to plant.

Luckily Almanzo and Cap aren't just hot, muscular, manly, town heroes with frostbitten toes -they're also master negotiators. Like Jimmy Carter at Camp David, but with much higher stakes. Actually in the end it's money that does most of the talking and Manzo and Cap get the wheat at $1.25 per bushel which is a crazy profit for lonely homesteader. Plus he may not realize it now but come spring he'll probably become as famous as Almanzo and Cap for saving the hamlet of De Smet. You can't really put a price on local celebrity.

So, yay the wheat has been hunted down and gathered on to the sleds but uh, that took 9hrs and the boys can't exactly just follow their tracks back home.
Almanzo headed towards the northwest, across the wide prairie white in it's covering of snow. His shadow was his only guide. One prairie swell was like another, one snow-covered slough differed from the next only in size...The horses were growing tired. They were afraid of falling into hidden holes in the snow and this fear added to their tiredness.

Then Almanzo sees a storm cloud brewing to the northwest and it's not and overcast and drizzle cloud, it's a dark cloud of death. For about 3 pages I was thinking Almanzo and Cap were going to have to make a fort out of snow and seed bags and they'd have to spend 3 days snuggled together (for body heat) to stay alive through the blizzard. But alas, I mean thankfully, they make it back to the town with milliseconds to spare.

Almanzo and Cap are heroes! The town's saved! But they won't know it till this last blizzard (blizzard 12: blizzard of our discontent) is over and they can leave their houses to find out.

Up next Sexy Rescue Pt. 3 - Mr. Loftus and Frostbite are Bitches

Sexy Rescue Pt. 1 - Sexy Planning

2010-03-13T13:21:00.000-08:00

The sexy rescue is a big deal so I'm splitting it into three parts. That may seem excessive but I have a LOT to say about sexy rescue and I don't want to die from dehydration writing one long post.

So...part 1: Sexy Planning

All winter there's been a rumor going around De Smet that there's a farmer 40 miles outside of town with a barn full of wheat. It's literally 100% conjecture but as the town gets more and more starving this brimming barn starts to seem a lot more real. But Houston, we have a problem- it's wall to wall blizzards up in De Smet this winter, yo. There's almost never been a whole day of clear weather between screeching blizzard winds and blinding snow. It actually pretty dangerous for Pa to even be going 3 miles out to the homestead to get more hay for fuel during the breaks

What manly 19 year old (or 19 year olds) would be willing to ride into the freezing snow plains in hope of finding a possible, not even probable, barn of full of wheat?
Duh, Almanzo Wilder, the future Mr. Laura.

He's hard working, and ballsy with piercing blue eyes and according to the man himself, 'I'm free, white, and twenty-one'
At first I was like, uh, okay that's a weird way to say that you do as you please, but then the next day I read the same exact phrase in Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge!
'Well it's your own money. You're free, white and twenty-one'
So this must have been some kind of semi racist, but really probably more just realist, earlier American idiom which thankfully has gone out of fashion.

I know that was a little off topic, but I had to say something because coincidences always seem steeped in meaning to me.

Obviously, once Pa hears that Almanzo's the kind of man who shares his love of risking his life to save townspeople he wants in. However, when he gets home and brings the idea up to Ma instead of deploying her patented 'Oh, Charles' she goes right into the cupboard, rustles up her backbone, blows the dust off, and shakes it in Pa's face.

'No!' said Ma.
Pa looked at her, startled. The all stared at her. They had never seen Ma look like that. She was quiet but she was terrible.
Quietly she told Pa, 'I say, No. You don't take such a chance.'
...Pa said mildly, 'Not as long as you feel that way about it, I won't. But...'
"I won't hear any buts, ' Ma said, still terrible. 'This time I put my foot down.'
'All right, that settles it' Pa agreed.

BooYEAH! Ma is finally in the house. Figuratively, of course, since she's barely been able to leave the house since November. Defcon 5 may actually end up being good for the Ingalls family dynamic in the long run. Depending, of course, on who ends up with what starvation related disability come Spring.

So sadly (for him) Pa will be sidelined for this near death adventure. Luckily, in the on deck circle, we have easy going, blond Cap Garland. Of the smile like the sunrise fame. Swoon. Someone send Mr. Edwards a telegram or a smoke signal so we can get the dreamboat trifecta going!

As soon as the next blizzard ends (blizzard 11: Jack Frost ripping at your toes) at 3am, Cap and Almanzo meet up in Main street for the trek south east in search of the mythical wheat. It's not exactly a walk in the park.

There was something mocking in the glitter of that trackless sea where every shadow moved a little and the blown snow spray confused the eyes searching for lost landmarks.

Luckily their horses and sleds keep falling into pockets of soft snow that won't support them. That way they can warm up by trampling the snow down and leading their horses out of the huge snow holes that result and maneuvering their sleds around them. Just as good a cup of hot tea. I really enjoy how chill Almanzo and Cap act while navigating what could very easily end up being a march to death. They joke about how to keep their feet from freezing and falling off, and how to navigate a completely landmark-less landscape. It's pretty hot.

'Which way'll we go?' Cap asked
'Any way's as good as any other,' Almanzo said. They rewound their mufflers again. Their breath had filled the mufflers with ice. They could hardly find a spot of wool to relieve the pain of ice on skin that it had chafed raw.
'How are your feet' he asked Cap.
'They don't say,' Cap replied.

These 19 year olds are men. They're a refreshing antidote to that whole 'stunted man-child' meme that's so popular now. But don't worry, if their feet get too frozen they can just rub snow on them. You know it's cold when rubbing snow on your feet warms them up.

Up next Sexy Rescue Pt. 2 - Sexy Success!

Coping Mechanisms

2010-03-13T12:30:00.000-08:00

For some perverse reason, I actually think that The Long Winter may be my favorite Little House book so far. Could be my inner masochist but I'm really thinking it's the best written. I really, truly feel caught up in this crazy, desperate Prairie blizzard mentality - even though I'm sitting by an open window with the sun is streaming in, along with some very pleasant breezes.

Regardless of my appreciation of Laura's story telling skills The Long Winter's been a little hard to read. Even though I know the Ingalls can't die, apparently any one of them could go blind or contract some other non-lethal malady. Carrie, for instance, is looking very frail of late, and I still don't totally trust folk remedies.

So, to counter the rather intense subject matter of the book I've been using an N'Sync sticker of Justin Timberlake I got at a bowling alley vending machine as a bookmark.

That way, if I'm reading about how much damage twisting hay bundles for fuel is doing to Laura's hands and winter coat, I can just look at a young Justin and think, 'things are going to be okay.'

You Sir, Are Dead to Me

2010-03-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

WTF Mr. Foster! Have you never been on a snowy hunt for antelope before? You do understand the town is starving to death, right? No? Okay then go ahead and do exactly as you please as long as you don't mind the blood of 78 starving pioneers on your hands. Gah!

First of all, stay on your M-effing horse, especially if it's the nicest horse in town and you borrowed it from Almanzo. Second, don't even go on extremely important hunts if you can't take the time in the morning to get your head out of your ass.

Seriously though, my blood was absolutely BOILING (spending too much time on the Prairie) when Mr. Foster shot at the antelope herd before he was even in range, scaring off both the herd and Almanzo's horse, Lady, in the process. Right now the Ingalls are each eating just 4 little potatoes a day and a slice of toast. Then going to bed early because there's not enough food for dinner or fuel to keep them warm. Do you know what a little antelope meat would have done for their morale and constitutions?!

I swear if Almanzo wasn't the manliest 19 year old on the prairie and able to track Lady down and bring her home I would have gotten that time machine working and gone back and sucker punched Mr. Foster in the kidneys.

Plus, ugh, the very next day Pa found out that the railroad was done even trying to run the train out to De Smet till the spring. Help, my friends, is not on the way.

Laura thought of the lost and lonely houses, each one alone and blind and cowering in the fury of the storm. There were houses in town, but not even a light from one of them could reach another. And the town was all alone on the frozen, endless prairie, where snow drifted and winds howled and the whirling blizzard put out the stars and the sun.

Yes, this is dire, but fear not! The chapter all you ladies and 10-15% of you gents have been waiting for is coming up next! Almanzo and Cap Garland to the sexy rescue!!

Just...Blizzards

2010-03-10T09:52:00.000-08:00

At first when the blizzards came I was coming up with nicknames for each like they were some long, horrible movie franchise. This amused me, amidst the gloom of the, well, blizzards. Blizzard 2 was Son of a Blizzard followed by Blizzard 3: The Freezening, and Blizzard 4: The Blizzard Ultimatum, but by the time I got to blizzard 5: The Hungry Wind, it just stoped being fun. (Though by the way, Blizzard 6: The Widow Maker)

Why not fun?

BECAUSE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

Every time there's one minute of sun every man in town goes to try to dig out the trains so we can get more pork fat and kerosene but there's never enough time. It always starts blizzarding before they can finish. They do get all the fun of temporary 'snow blindness' though. Without the trains there's no food, no fuel, no nothing.

Pa bought the very last scraps of food in town for Christmas - 2 cans of oysters (I know it's an Ingalls Christmas favorite but YUCK!) and a bag of unground wheat. Now there's no food to buy anywhere, and neither the dry goods store nor the general store has any kerosene for the lamps or coal to heat the houses and cook - there's not even any lumber left in town to burn to stay warm. January 1st, the winter's been on for 3 months and the wise Native American said 7 months of winter. Yikes!

I don't know what everyone else in town is doing but Pa and Laura are spending all day outside in the lean-to twisting hay into tight bundles to burn for warmth.* It's working, but about as well as you think. Plus their hands are all cut up and raw and the hay twisting is wearing away their winter coats. Not a good time to be wearing away their winter coats.

Carrie and Mary spend their days taking turns grinding the wheat with a coffee grinder. It takes a long ass time to grind enough wheat to bake a loaf of bread each day with a coffee grinder. And they don't have some $10 electrical coffee grinder from Target, it's one of those industrial age machines that looks like it wants to eat fingers. That's all they do all day, grind wheat, twist hay and huddle around the stove when they get a break.

Crafty Ma some how manages to make some kind of weird candle out of axle grease and a button. Not sure how it works or what the button does, but Pa's very impressed. It's not really enough light to knit by but you can kind of read by it and anyway it keeps them from sitting around in the pitch dark listening to the blizzard scream all around them all day.

Laura lay in bed and listened to the winds blowing, louder and louder. They sounded like the pack of wolves howling around the little house on the prairie long ago... And there was the deeper howl of the great buffalo wolf that she and Carrie had met on the banks of Silver Lake. She started trembling, when she heard the scream of the panther in the creek bed, in Indian territory.... Now she heard the Indian war whoops when the Indians were dancing their war dances all through the horrible nights by the Verdigris River. The war whoops died away and she heard the crowds of people muttering, then shrieking and fleeing screaming away from the fierce yells chasing them. But she knew she heard only the voices of the blizzard winds.

I know that's a long quote but just wanted to make sure you understand that these blizzards are worse than all of the ways Laura's almost died together. And if you've read the books, or for instance, this blog, you know that's some deep shit.

For me, the worst part would be the cold. It's 40 effing degrees below zero and they're heating their house with hay bundles! Last night where I live it was 40 degrees above zero and I was laying in bed inside my insulated house thinking it was kinda cold. (Possibly reading The Long Winter was making it feel extra chilly) There's 80 degrees difference between 40 above and 40 below. The same difference as between 40 degrees and 120 degrees. I know you can add, that was just to dramatize.

Basically...I never felt so bad for these poor bastards. Shut up in their house, just potatoes and toast to eat, and not that much of either, barely any light all day, screaming blizzard noises outside. The only thing that differentiates one day from another is if Mary finishes a rag rug or they recite verses from their reader during the short breaks between wheat grinding and straw twisting.
When will the trains come!? When will the blizzards end!?

Okay, sorry. To lighten things up, I'm going to end with a treasury of the nonsensical wit and comically olde tyme exclamations of Pa. Please enjoy -

"She's (Laura) as stout as a French horse."

"By George! that dinner looks good!" said Pa. "I could eat a raw bear without salt!"

It (the blizzard) came with a shriek. the windows rattled and the house shook. "She must be a daisy!" Pa said.

"I beat the blizzard to the stable by the width of a gnat's eyebrow!"

"Jerusalem crickets! This is a humdinger!"

"Gee whillikins, it's a cold day,"

"Gosh Dang this blizzard! It only lets go long enough to spit on it's hands."

To which Ma replied, "Don't swear, Charles!" It took me a little while to suss out the curse word but I think it's either gosh, dang, or spit.

* Actually we do know what Almanzo and Royal are doing. They're eating huge stacks of pancakes whenever they want with sizzling ham, and burning thier plentiful coal and hiding their wheat in the walls. But don't get mad at them, they don't realize how hard up everyone else is yet.

Blizzard 2: Son of a Blizzard

2010-03-09T10:43:00.000-08:00

Blizzard 2: Son of a Blizzard hits De Smet while Laura and Carrie are at school. Laura knows it's coming because she's a hardened and Prairie-smart girl who's been through a deadly blizzard or twenty in her brief life. The teacher and all the other kids, however, are spoiled brats from 'the East' who think snow is pretty and won't kill you and everyone you love given half a chance. Ha!

Instead of saying anything when she sees the signs of impending doom, Laura stays mum because she was raised to speak only when spoken to, not attract attention and never contradict an adult. Bad parenting pt. 1 million and 1.

I have to admit I'm totally freaked out by how fast these life threatening blizzards come up. One minute they're all reading psalms and wondering how long till lunch and the next moment the sun's blotted out and Laura's calculating how long they can survive in the school house by burning the desks. Yikes!

By the time the teacher decides it's time to leave the school house and try to get all these kids home, the blizzard's on in earnest. There's zero visibility and all the children of the town are in very real danger of wandering out into the Prairie and dying a horrible death. Wholesale death of the next generation is never good for town pride.

Her chest sobbed for air and her eyes strained open in the icy snow-particles that hurt them like sand. Carrie struggled bravely, stumbling and flopping, doing her best to stay on her feet and keep on going. Only for instants when he snow-whirl was thinner could they glimpse the shadows moving ahead of them.

Keep in mind that both Laura and Carrie are under 5 feet and way less than 100lbs soaking wet. By some crazy stroke of luck Laura bumps into the side of the hotel instead of wandering into the Prairie and she and the rest of the kids and the teacher are able to navigate home by clinging to the buildings of Main street.

Finally! Laura and Carrie stumble into the house, half dead, coated in ice and what does Ma say?
Is Carrie all right? and All's well that ends well.

Not really, Ma! How can you say that while Laura's digging the ice out from between her socks and shoes and wiping the blood off her eyelids where the snow scratched them. Do you know how cold snow has to be to scratch your eyelids till they bleed? Why don't you go outside and find out.

Sorry, but Ma's really getting on my nerves lately. I know her life sucks and she's used to hardship, but so is Pa and he was getting ready to go out into the Prairie to find his daughters when they burst in the door half dead. Ma's just like, 'Oh good, you didn't die, who wants tea?'
I guess Ma's used to it but extremes of weather really freak me out.

Blizzard 2: Son of a Blizzard goes on for the regular 3 days and as usual both moustaches and the nails that hold the house together get coated in frost for the duration. Blizzards suck. Bored and cold is a horrible combo and basically the entire reason I moved to California.

We do learn that Almanzo has become a great cook away from Mother's kitchen. He and Royal eat 25 buckwheat pancakes with molasses each the 1st morning of the storm while they joke about what will happen if the winter's so bad the trains can't run. Ha, ha, ha, that could never happen, right? Everyone in town would starve to death!

Look, I've read enough Little House to know foreshadowing when I read it.

It's Been Months Since We Moved...

2010-03-06T11:14:00.000-08:00

Though Pa's been nervous about spending the (long) winter in the claim shack since page 1, it takes a run in with a wise old Native American in the general store to like, really, really, really convince him we're headed for the snowpocalypse.

Question - did Native Americans really talk like this, or did Buggs Bunny cartoons and young adult novels from the 30s (ahem) just convince us they did?
Heap big snow, big wind...Many moons...You white men, I tell-um you.

As soon as Pa hears about how heap big the snow's going to be he rushes home to pack up the fam and move back to town. (6th move since they got to South Dakota). They'll be living in the storefront but supposedly some weatherizing has gone on so no one should be getting snowed on while they sleep. Hopefully.

Even though none of the Ingalls enjoy being crowded in by the 78 other pioneers in town, Ma's sure happy that Carrie and Laura will be able to go to school all winter. Hey Laura, the more school you attend the quicker you can become a teacher! Excited?

Laura didn't want to teach, but she must do it to please Ma. Probably all her life she must go among strange people and teach strange children; she must always be scared and she must never show it.

Geez Laura! I'm totally against Ma forcing you to become a teacher if you don't want, but you're supposed to be this fearless frontier girl. What happened to the ballsy 8 year old who stole the playground from that horrible Nellie Olsen? Maybe you've been spending too much time alone. It's O-K to talk with people who don't share mitochondrial DNA with you.

I shouldn't have worried though because even though Laura's throat was so choked that she could hardly breath when she walked up to the school house before you know it she's made friends, learned geography, caught a ball and generally acclimated to a non bumpkin lifestyle.

Besides the joy of learning and ball catching, 2 very important things came to light in and around the school house-

1. The introduction of Cap Garland (who Helen B talked about crushing on in the comments, and I suspect she's not alone) Blond Cap may prove to be some serious competition for Laura's attention. While Almanzo looks at Laura like he already knows her, Cap Garland has a grin...like the sun coming up at dawn; it changed everything. If that doesn't stink of some serious Prairie puppy love, I don't know what does. I foresee Laura knitting a certain someone some special woolen socks this (long) winter.
Time to step it up 'Manzo before someone steals your child bride!

2. Remember the teamster who wouldn't leave the railroad camp last winter because he wasn't done getting the 'prairie cure'? Well it looks like the 'prairie cure' actually did the trick, and his consumptive lungs are almost totally clear! He's now the Depot manager and his son goes to school with Laura and Carrie. So, I suck for making fun of folk medicine. My apologies folk remedies, I'll do my best to avoid breathing night air from now on.

So, if you have tuberculosis go ahead and move out to De Smet. The cure should still work, it's not like De Smet turned into some throbbing metropolis covered in smog and plagued by tire fires. It's still only a mile square and has just a little over 1,000 people. FYI, De Smet is also the home of the 'Laura Ingalls Wilder Pagent', which I heard about on This American Life and it's actually one of the main reasons I started this blog. It's act 4 if you're interested, which you should be because the people of De Smet are just as wholesome, hard working and full of the pioneer spirit as you could ever hope. It's really rather heart warming. And I love having my heart warmed.

A Short Start to a Long Winter

2010-03-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

1. 'The Long Winter' is the 6th book of 9 in the 'Little House' series which means we're more than half way through. To celebrate I just want to say, haycock.
Why? I've probably circled the word haycock 100 times in the last 5 books but I've never been able to come up with anything to say about it that would reach above a fifth grade snicker. However, I can't let it go without comment any longer... haycock!

2. Almanzo watch 1880! Carrie and Laura decide to take a short cut through the slough on the way back from getting a replacement part of Pa's mowing machine. Seemed like a good idea at the time but they weren't counting on the sucking mud and the grass being taller than they were. Before you know it they're lost and frantic and sweaty. No big deal except olde tyme children are always getting lost and dying in high grass. To the point where it's Ma's greatest fear.

When they finally burst out of the slough into the sunshine, it's not Pa and his mower they see, but one Almanzo Wilder lounging (which is very un-Almanzo like) on top of a hay waggon.
His blue eyes twinkled down at her as if he had known her a long time.
Laura, you slut! She makes up for her lascivious blue-eye-noticing by turning on her heel and marching home.

3. Even if 'The Long Winter' wasn't already notorious for its hardship, and you didn't read the back cover of the book, Laura does a damn good job of ominously foreshadowing what's coming all Fall.

First we learn a little about the connection between muskrat architecture and meteorology-
'The colder the winter will be, the thicker the muskrats build the walls of their houses,' Pa told her.'
'I never saw a heavier-built muskrats' house then that one.'
Ruh, roh!

Nature's not done with the signs though; not a single duck, goose or bird of any kind stops at Silver Lake on the way South, and all the bunnies and other rodents are already hidden away underground. Which sucks not only because a crtitterless prairie is portent of evil but also because it means Pa can't get any meat. Add that to the early frost that killed their garden and all the Ingalls have for the whole winter is a sack of beans, a bushel of potatoes, a gallon of tomato preserves and a quart of green tomato pickles. There are 6 people in the family and it's only the middle of September.

Then, 'A b-b-b-b-blizzard!' Ma chattered. 'In Oc-October. I n-n-never heard of...'

An October 1st blizzard and the claim shanty is only marginally better put together than the storefront in town. Instead of waking up with a foot of snow on her, Laura wakes up with an inch of ice on top of her blankets. Which seems worse, right? Plus, Snow had blown under the door and across the floor and every nail in the walls was white with frost. And, Icy cold breezes sucked and fluttered the curtains around the bed.

There's nothing for the Ingalls to do during the 2 day blizzard but wrap themselves in quilts and huddle around the stove, shivering. Ma cooks beans all day and at noon they drink tea and the broth from the beans (filling!). The girls spend part of the late afternoon marching in place to warm up and then for dinner they eat the beans. For 2 days!

I'm just going to say it again, if you like to move all the time why not move some place with mild winters?! Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota and South Dakota have to be 4 of the worst places to spend a winter in a house made of tar paper and logs. And it's not like they can just jump in a hot shower to warm up - Carrie won't even have wool socks for the winter till Mary finishes blind-knitting them! I wish Laura would explain Pa's obsession with hardship to me. But not from beyond the grave because that would be scary.

Even after the blizzard is over, it's still way below freezing and Mother Nature has left one last totally freaky surprise on the Prairie for Laura and Pa to find by the hayracks.

They did not seem like real cattle. They stood so terribly still. In the whole herd there was not the least movement. Only their breathing sucked their hairy sides in between the rib bones and pushed them out again. Their hip bones and their shoulder bones stood up sharply. Their legs were braced out, stiff and still. And where their heads should be, swollen white lumps seemed fast to the ground under the blowing snow.

What's up with the emaciated cows? Their breath froze over their eyes and mouths till their heads were glued to the ground in an ice casing. If that doesn't freak you out I don't know what will.

The Gang's All Here

2010-03-02T15:28:00.000-08:00

First of all friends, I'm sorry it's been so long since I posted but I've involved myself in a writing gig that's paying me some money and it's been forcing me slack off on the Prairie. But don't worry I won't let it go 2 weeks again!

It's Spring in South Dakota and with Spring comes the return of the Surveyor and his desire to live in his own house, Ingalls-free. Laura doesn't say but I'm wondering if he was a little pissed to find out that Ma used up all his food stores selling breakfasts to arriving settlers. The girls made a crap-ton of money and the Surveyor's been left with nary a scrap of fat floating in the brine at the bottom of the pork fat barrel.

Maybe the food theft is the reason Pa decides the family needs to move out of the Surveyor's house well in advance of his arival. Unfortunately while the homestead is legally Ingalls-owned it's still just dirt clods, dead grass and rolling hills. You can't put a little china shepherdess on a dirt clod. You need a carved bracket or a hand made shelf, minimum.

Luckily Pa, showing some heretofore unknown business acumen, has thrown up a storefront on the booming new Main Street of De Smet in the hopes of flipping it to whichever eager settler runs panting up to the door 1st. So, until Pa can build another house (which he must be getting pretty good at) the Ingalls can chill in the store front.

Did I say chill? Because I meant almost freeze to death. Pa didn't exactly throw his back out building the store front and Laura wakes up one particularly chilly morning to Pa shoveling a foot of snow off the top of her covers. But don't worry it only took him 3 jerks of a lambs tail to get all the snow off. Did I ever mention what a cheese farmer Pa is? I mean, yes he has cows and farms cheese but he also really knows his way around a dorky turn of phrase.

Ma, who I thought would be happy living in town since she loves civilization - actually hates it. She's positively terrified of letting the girls leave the store front for the mud and construction and questionable company of Main Street. She's come up with a fun way to keep them inside, though; having Laura 'teach school' to the neighborhood toddlers. Extreme boredom results on all sides and, to Ma's confusion, eventually the town's little girls won't come within 10 yards the store front. Laura's secretly delighted because SHE DOESN'T WANT TO BE A SCHOOL TEACHER. Comprende, Ma? No? Okay.

Basically, living in the storefront sucks. It's drafty, the roof is more of a suggestion than a reality, Laura and Pa hate being in town and Ma hates being around frontier toughs. Especially after a few frontier toughs, turned claim jumpers, turned murderers, kill a homesteader who won't give up his claim.

Just a thought Pa, but it might be a good time to go out and start living on that claim before you have to, you know, lay down your life for your land. Good idea! We'll leave in the morning, and before you know it everyone's all packed up and sitting in the waggon, ready to start fresh. AGAIN.

Then finally, FINALLY! The moment I've been waiting for since I finished the chronicle of child abuse that is Farmer Boy. People, Almanzo Wilder, future Laura lover has entered the Prairie.

Laura spies Almanzo and his brother Royal while they're riding out to the homestead and is instantly impressed. Impressed by their horses, but she'll take notice of that body shaped by child labor in good time, because it looks like the Wilder boys and their super nice horses will be homesteading just north of our Ingalls. Sexy!

I know 'The Long Winter' is coming next and I'm emotionally girded for bad times, but on the upside I'm thinking a budding romance may take some of the sting out of any death or near-death experiences. Hopefully said romance will also mean an end to this silly forced teacher-tude plan Ma and Pa have for Laura.

Long story short for the end of 'By the Shores of Silver Lake' - the Ingalls move into their shanty which is too small to fit all their furniture, plant trees, loose Baby Grace, find Baby Grace in a field of violets, get bitten by mosquitoes, put up mosquito netting, Pa plays his fiddle and all is well and right in the world as it always is in the end of each book.

FOR NOW! Join me on the flip side for what the commenters have been threatening will be a harrowing trip through 'The Long Winter'.

T.G.I. Mr. Edwards!!

2010-02-19T12:00:00.001-08:00

Program note: I just (duh) realized that the Ingalls are actually in South Dakota not North Dakota. Forgive me. I tired to go back and change all the Norths to Souths but let me know if you find one and I'll wrestle it into submission. Thanks!

This winter has been weird. I mean the Ingalls' winter on the South Dakota prairie has been weird, not mine. Though my winter has been really weird as well.

But not weird like 10 or 15 westward moving settlers showing up at my doorstep every night expecting dinner and breakfast for a quarter. THAT is weird. Yes, the race for homesteads is on and despite being out in the Dakota territories for 8 effing months, Pa has yet to register a claim. Classic. See, he was looking for JUST the right quarter section, man, you can't rush genius like that.

Luckily when Pa was chasing the buffalo wolf that may or may not have wanted to eat Laura and Carrie he found the dream claim. Hmm, it's kind of snowy though Pa, so maybe you should just wait until every single man east of Sioux Falls heads out here with a sled and a dream.

By the time March rolls around it's hard for Pa to even leave the house because due to some Prairie code the Ingalls have to feed and house every single person traveling within 10 miles of their house. The house is so full of rough, drunk men that after the girls help wash the 10,000 loads of dishes they have to lock themselves in the attic till the men leave in the morning.

Though the vulnerable women folk angle is making it hard for Pa to travel to Brookings to file his claim eventually he just has to leave in the middle of the night. Otherwise the Ingalls are going to end up itinerant, landless day laborers their entire lives. Except for Laura, of course, who will be forced into teaching school.

The plan was, ride down to Brookings, file the claim, come home that night. Unfortunately this trip is suffering from a heavy dose of Pa so he's about 2 months late to just roll up and take his free land. The 1st day, he waits in line for 8hrs at the Land Office and doesn't even get near the door. Bummer. Then while he's eating dinner he overhears some burly types talking about snatching up the quarter section Pa picked out for the family. Double bummer!

As usual what Pa lacks in planning he makes up for with a physical willingness to put up with anything. Pa runs right over to the Land Office to camp out and sleep over night. Now this was in March but I checked and in Brookings, South Dakota today it's 27 degrees and going down to 7 over night. 7 is cold for sleeping outside with no food and just a buffalo skin jacket, but this isn't tickets for Megadeath, it's 160 acres of land and if you don't die (or can't like Pa) it's worth it.

Yay, Pa's 1st in line for the camp-out! Boo, the burly dudes who want his claim are right behind him in line. Then over night some jerk De Smet friend of Pa's totally outs him as competition for the dream homestead right in front of the burlies. Things get unfriendly, and fast.

By the time the Land Office opens in the morning there's over 200 men in line and they aren't the polite and orderly line type of men. It's shove or be shoved and right when the door opens Burly 1 yells to Burly 2 to start a fight with Pa to keep him out of the office so Burly 1 can sneak in and stake the claim. It's prairie justice and 2 burlies will always beat 1 Pa so things are looking bad till -
Right then, quick as a wink, somebody landed like a ton of brick on the Huron man (Burly 2). 'Go in, Ingalls!' he yelled. 'I'll fix 'im! Yow-ee-ee!'

It was Mr. Edwards!! You know, from Indian Territory, the dreamboat who waded naked across a creek with his clothes and 7 sweet potatoes on his head to bring Laura and Mary their little tin cups and shiny pennies for Christmas. Swoon! A Mr. Edwards appearance is a real treat for me and the Ingalls, and thanks to him Pa's shitty planning has been thwarted and the Ingalls are real homesteaders! Yay!!!

Meh-rry Christmas

2010-02-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

Even though I personally consider Christmas more of an annual hurdle to jump than a circled day of warmth and fellowship on my calender, I've always enjoyed Christmas in the Ingalls various prairie locals. Sometimes it's the only chapter when anything nice happens to the family. But I don't know, this year I'm not really feeling it. Despite the fact that Laura keeps proclaiming this THE BEST CHRISTMAS EVER!

Really? Tell that to Mary, she might have preferred any one of the Christmases before she went blind.

In South Dakota, the Ingalls get an unexpected visit from the Boasts whose bobsled gets stuck in a snow drift outside their house on Christmas eve. The visit is good news because Mr. Boast has a nice laugh and Mrs. Boast has twinkly eyes (and wears a woolen veil which I'm always happy to see make an appearance) but bad news because now, for some reason, the Ingalls have to rustle up extra Christmas gifts for them. Not an easy task when it's taken them months just to fabricate one gift each for each other out of Ma's scrap bag.

Mr. Boast gets the knitted red and grey wristlets that Ma had made for Pa, but no one explains what knitted wristlets are so I don't know. I know they're probably to keep your wrists warm, but are wrists some underserved area that can't be covered by mittens and coats and sleeves and what not?

Mrs. Boast gets long suffering Ma's best Sunday handkerchief. Poor Ma. Don't worry though because Mary blind sewed her a new one, and I think we can all agree that a handkerchief sewn by a blind teenager is a special gift indeed.

What's really bothering me about this Christmas is that it seems to be hammering all kinds of nails into the coffin that's turning Laura into a young Ma. Sorry for the tortured metaphor, I'm not sure how a coffin would turn Laura into Ma but I really wanted to evoke some deathly imagery. To scare you.

First of all instead of something fun like red mittens or a tin cup or a little fur cape, Laura gets an apron for Christmas. An apron!! They might as well have embroidered her some handcuffs or knitted her a 6 lid stove. And not just any apron but one that matches the apron the girls made Ma for Christmas. Barely veiled symbolism.

Then when Pa comes in from unsticking the Boast's bobsled from the slough the first thing he does is pick up Baby Grace and swing her around.
...Grace screamed with laughter just as Laura used to. Laura had to remember hard that she was a big girl now or she would have laughed out loud too.

No more laughing out loud, Laura! Ma already told you that a lady never, never gets excited about anything and never does anything to attract attention to herself. Sigh, Ma just can't stop being a tool of her own repression.

Lastly, I know the Ingalls live right next door to malnutrition most of the year but I still get depressed when they get so excited over meals that would send Almanzo crying to his bedroom on any random Sunday.
Ma set on the table the big platter of golden, fried mush, a plate of hot biscuits, a dish of fried potatoes, a bowl of codfish gravy and a glass dish of dried-apple sauce...Such a breakfast as that, like Christmas, came only once a year.

Sorry but fried mush and codfish gravy sounds like the worst. Compare that to what Almanzo had for lunch at the county fair

...ham and chicken and turkey, and dressing and cranberry jelly; he ate potatoes and gravy, succotash, baked beans and boiled beans and onions, and white bread and rye'n'injun bread, and sweet pickles and jam and preserves.Then he drew a long breath, and he began to eat pie, he wished he had eaten nothing else. He ate a piece of pumpkin pie and piece of custard pie, and he ate almost a piece of vinegar pie. He tried a piece of mince pie, but could not finish.

Poor impoverished Ma-becoming Laura. She can't even chase a wolf across a frozen lake during a full moon anymore without feeling guilty.

Prairie Cures???

2010-02-13T12:46:00.000-08:00

I want to start by letting you know that I know it's wrong to make fun of historical personages' understanding of medicine and very basic health care. A brief Internet search will let you know that I did not invent penicillin or sequence the human genome. I wasn't even the school teacher who created Airborn. I've been happily and lazily riding medical coat tails and gaming our bloated health care system.

That said, COME ON! Prairie folk are like one teeny baby step away from drowning kittens to remove bad humors from their spleens.

First we can't have a slice of watermelon on a hot day or breath 'night air' because they're both gonna get you a nasty case of 'fever'n'ague, which we modern jerks call malaria. Now we've got some rickety old man who won't leave the railroad camp before winter because he's too busy enjoying the benefits of 'the Prairie cure' which according to Ma invalids travel the world over to experience. What does the prairie cure cure? Consumption, aka the King's evil, aka the white plague, aka tuberculosis.

(Side note: as a child I always thought 'consumption' was a euphemism for alcoholism, you know, because they were consuming too much.)

When I think Prairie about the last thing that comes to mind is 'return to health'. I know I get all my 19th century Prairie info through Laura's eyes but she really LIKES the Prairie and her descriptions positively terrify me. If I had a life threatening illness I'm pretty sure I would not caravan right into the belly of the beast and then refuse to leave my shanty as the temperatures drop below freezing. Folk lore or no.

I looked all over the Internet to find out why living on the South Dakota prairie was supposed to be so good for a wasting disease like tuberculosis, but came up empty handed. I did find that in the early 20th century it was widely believed that TB was caused by masturbation. Of course the advent of free Internet porn would have created a pandemic that would surely have killed us all by now if that were true. And before the industrial revolution TB was linked to vampirism (because of all the blood coughing) and the wasting was attributed to attendance of all night fairy parties. Not joking.

Thank you modern times.

Good News Bad News

2010-02-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

It's weird how much control a Pa had over his family's lives back in olde tymes. Obviously whenever Laura's Pa wants to move there's barely time to make extra biscuts before your ass is bumping down the prairie in the waggon bed. But apparently Pa also gets to decide how all the children will be spending their adult lives.

Pa's one concession to Ma for his wanderlustful ways has been the promise that the girls will, at least sporadically, attend school. Secret part B of the promise to Ma, which was just revealed, is that one of the girls will become a teacher. Just like Ma and Ma's Ma. Since it's over 100 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act, no one believes Mary can hack it despite the fact that she can patch quilts blind, which I find way more impressive than basic math.

Laura's heart jerked, and then she seemed to feel it falling, far, far, down. She did not say anything. She knew that Pa and Ma, and Mary too, had though that Mary would be a teacher... She could not disappoint Ma. She must do as Pa said. So she had to be a school teacher when she grew up.

It really kind of sucks that Laura wasn't born with a penis. I think she would have made for a much happier pioneer boy than a pioneer girl.

So there's your bad news for Laura though I'm counting on Almanzo to sweep her away before these career plans go too far. The good news is that originally after the summer was over in the Dakotas and the railroad crews were done for the year, the Ingalls were going to have to move back east for the winter. Their shanty couldn't last 20 seconds in a South Dakota winter, and it's too late to claim a homestead and build even a sod house. Not only is moving east always a huge boner killer for Pa and Laura, but the Ingalls would have to spend all the money Pa made over the summer just to stay alive durrning the winter. Another genius Pa plan at work.

Then, just the day before they were set to leave, the Ingalls get a very, very, very rare strike of good luck. The surveyor was planning to spend the winter guarding the work sight and had stocked his house full of food and coal but at the last minute he was like, 'Wait, 6 months alone in the North Dakota winter? Was I on drugs when I agreed to that? Let's see if I can pawn this job off on some bumpkin family.'

One man's bleak winter is another man's wind fall, and the Ingall's were just the bumpkins for the job.

Since the house is all stocked the family won't have to use all their money to live off during the winter, and more importantly they won't have to go East. East is the most blasphemous four letter word in Pa's vocabulary.

Ma's bummed, of course, because she thought she was going to get to live near a town for the winter, which is her only desire. Luckily she's had lots of practice pushing her feelings down, way down, and locking them in a box and throwing that box off an imaginary bridge and then getting up in the middle of the night to cut herself just so she can feel SOMETHING.

Actually I don't have confirmation on that last point but I wouldn't be surprised.

Even Ma's going to be happy in the surveyor's house though - it has board floors (much easier to sweep than dirt floors (obviously)) and the surveyor's stove has 6 lids! My stove doesn't have any lids so maybe not everything is better in now times. For some reason the most exciting part of the move for Laura is that there's a big wooden box full of soda crackers in the pantry. She says 'soda crackers!' approximately 400 times in 3 pages.

At first I thought soda crackers were some exciting kind of cracker that history had forgotten but my suspicion that they were basically saltines was confirmed by a google search. Though, according to the bizarrely specific commenters on chowhound soda crackers just aren't what they used to be. By which I mean they're slightly more crumbly.

Another exciting find in the pantry?
The third [barrel] had a tight lid, and it was full of pieces of fat, white pork held down in brown brine.
Mmmm!! Saltines and strips of pork fat, what else could you need to enjoy a winter trapped in your home 60 miles from your nearest neighbor?

Well the pioneer edition of Boggle would probably be a welcome addition, plus satellite TV, central heating, Chinese delivery and Snuggies.

Bad Parenting Pt. 1 Million

2010-02-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

If you were a scrappy pioneer girl, living at a railroad camp, and singing children's songs about wanting to marry a railroad man as you milked your family's cow, wouldn't you at least want to check out that railroad being constructed? It's a modern marvel after all.

Obviously yes. Especially after your Pa tells you that soon, 'pretty nearly everybody'll ride on railroads and there'll hardly be a covered wagon left.' What! No covered wagons? Everyone wealthy enough to ride a train? Impossible.

So when Pa finally tells Laura he'll take her over to see the men and the teams working on the railroad she hops up and yells 'Wooo!' Actually she says, 'Oh, Pa!' but in Ma's book she might as well have peed on the floor and eaten a shoe. As soon as Pa leaves the room (which means leaving the house since it's just one room) Laura gets the talking to of a lifetime.

First of all Laura's cousin slash kindred spirit Lena cannot come with since she's such a horrible influence on Laura. What with the scandalous songs about Bavarian broom salesmen and her shameful desire to have fun when her 12hr work days are over. And just so you know, girls should never, EVER, get excited about ANYTHING (not kidding) or speak in anything above a low voice. A low voice is the perfect compliment to a lady's 'gentle manners'.

(Which are apparently important even if you're living in a shanty on the edge of a railroad camp on the American frontier. Ma would probably be better off teaching Laura to hold her liquor and a gun.)

The up shot of this weird screed is that Laura's allowed to go see the teams as long as she goes QUIETLY with Pa. She must promise to be well behaved and ladylike, and remember that a lady never does anything that could attract attention.

Ma, I know you want the best for your kids and you hate the life you've followed Pa into, but I really don't think turning your daughters into little yous is such a hot idea. How's being quiet and not attracting attention working for you? You did want to live in a shanty with a piece of calico separating your bed from your 4 children's beds and another piece of cloth sectioning off the kitchen, right? Your dream was to spend a couple years living out of a covered wagon, one surrounded by hostile natives who want to kill you and the rest in abject poverty at best. Right?

Haven't you ever seen that bumper sticker about how well behaved women seldom make history? Well google it.

My god, Ma hasn't even unpacked the little china shepherdess yet on this trip and as we know the shepherdess is both a metaphor for Ma's attempts to bring civility to the west, and a symbol of her fragile spirit, so leaving it unpacked is a very, very bad sign.

So please Ma, don't crush Laura's spirit prematurely just because you live on the brink of a nervous breakdown. The Long Winter is next and Laura's spirit needs to be indomitable as possible.

Prairie We Can Believe In!

2010-02-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I was curious about how these Little House books supposedly rocked the faces off everyone's childhood. I really don't know how I ended up not reading them and I really wanted to have the face rocked off my young(ish) adulthood. Who wouldn't?

Before you hate, believe me, I'm into the Ingalls. Septuagenarian Laura is a great writer and she can really, um, EVOKE, what it was like to live a pre-modern childhood with a flighty dad in an inhospitable landscape. So, good job Laura, but I think you can tell that I've been taken aback by the subject matter a time or two.

I mean, I did 2 posts on ways the Ingalls almost died, 2 about why they didn't, and I can't even count the number of times I thought Pa was dead. And these are supposed to be children's books! Sometimes it just feels a little more Truman Capote than Beatrice Potter. Just saying.

What am I really just saying though?
I think things are looking up this time. (Am I the girl who really believes this is the last time he'll cheat?) For forever it was Ingalls vs. Elements. While the Ingalls have a master craftsman father, a can-do pioneer spirit and a tiny china shepherdess figurine, the elements have prairie fires, blizzards, shimmering clouds of grasshoppers, unstable frozen rivers and disease spreading night air. Uh, no contest and that's how older sisters end up going blind, space age poly-carbons or no.

But now that we're going to the shores of Silver Lake the world is exciting and fair again (for once?). Not for Mary, she's still blind, but don't worry Laura does a lot of describing for her and her favorite activity has always been sitting quietly anyway.

Usually when the Ingalls pack up and move they have to endure 15 pages of endless, empty landscape, bumpy waggon benches and scorching heat. Well it's 1878 and the future is now! The lady Ingalls are traveling to the Dakotas on the train at the break-neck speed of 20 miles an hour.

Now you or I would obviously honk our horns right off if someone was doing 20 in front of us on the road from Walnut Grove, Minnesota to De Smet, South Dakota but covered waggons only cover 20 miles in a DAY. It actually kind of hurts Laura's eyes to look out the window and see the Prairie running by so quickly. Luckily there are all kinds of marvels to gawk at inside the train. The seats are covered in red velvet for Christ's sake.

See if you can you guess what feat of engineering she's describing here?
Laura had never seen anything so fascinating. It was all so neat, and so marvelous, that she wanted to fill the cup again and again.

A water fountain with it's own little tin cup! That everyone on the train shares, ew. It's neat and marvelous and you would think so too if you ever had to go outside with a pail in a blizzard to wash your face.

Then once they meet up with Pa and get to the 1st rail road camp Laura finally meets a kindred spirit, her cousin Lena. For 13 years basically the only person Laura's ever gotten to hang out with is Mary. We love Mary and I would never speak ill of the blind but she's a total goody-two-shoes who hates mud, having fun and taking off her bonnet which are three of Laura's favorite things. Though I bet 'Little House on the Prairie' the TV series would crack her top 3 if TV existed then and the show didn't start 15 years after she died.

The very first thing that Lena teaches Laura to do is jump on a horse bareback while it's running. The Prairie's empty so there's nothing to hit and they can just run forever. How badass does that sound? Jumping on a horse bareback and racing around the prairie, that's my kind of Prairie fun! Forget this setting fish traps and sewing nine patch quilts nonsense.

Of course the Ingalls almost get murdered again on the way to the second railroad camp but pulses don't quicken when Death trots by anymore and danger is averted before anything worse then Ma going a little more bonkers happens.

Ma looked back to see that her girls were all right, and she held Grace snugly on her lap. She did not say anything because nothing she could say would make any difference. But Laura knew that Ma had never wanted to leave Plum Creek and did not like to be here now; she did not like traveling in that lonely country with night coming on and such men riding the prairie.
I wouldn't either Ma, but maybe try out having a backbone once in a while. K?

The second railroad camp is cool too, it's huge and full of rough men and teams of horses and there's a (Silver) lake and a bunch of their relatives from Wisconsin are there. It seems like a great big breath of fresh air after drought and plague and Nellie Olson blighted Minnesota. Of course I was feeling equally optimistic after they left 'Indian Territory' for Plum Creek so...

Laura, I don't like when people play on my emotions, let's keep this one fun for a change.

Secretary, Hold My Calls

2010-02-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

It only took 3 pages of By the Shores of Silver Lake to make me want to open my wrists. But, um, figuratively.

PAGE 1: Half of page 1 is covered with a picture of a horse and buggy. The other half lets us know that Mary, Carrie (ne Baby Carrie) Baby Grace (the new Ingalls) and Ma all are sick with scarlet fever and Pa doesn't have enough money to pay the doctors bills. Bam, page 1! Laura is not in the business of sugar coating it for you.

PAGE 2: When I first started this blog one of my friends made a flip comment about Mary going blind and I've been dreading it happening ever since. Friends, the Scarlett fever has stolen Mary's sight. Plus:
Her beautiful golden hair was gone. Pa had shaved it close because of the fever...Her blue eyes were still beautiful but they did not know what was before them and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.

Aw, poor, bossy, perfect, Mary. I'm sure a teeny-tiny small part of Laura is secretly pleased that all Mary's blond curls are gone but I think we can all agree that being a blind 19th century teenage girl is a pretty shit lot to get in life. Even under the best circumstances.

Of course, the Ingalls are never in the 'best circumstances'. In addition the the sickness, the blindness and the poverty and despite the absence of the grasshoppers Pa's wheat crops have been puny 2 years running. So much for the richest land in the country, Pa. All there is to eat is potatoes and molasses and everyone's too bummed out to even get up and eat it.
Sorry, but that's what's up with page 2.

Minnesota sucks (not in general just Ingalls-wise, so don't get mad). Why could they not just stay in Wisconsin?! Everyone was so happy in Little House in the Big Woods. There were sugar dances and plenty of hunting and their families were there. Harumph.

PAGE 3: When Pa's unhappy there's only one thing on his mind, and one answer to every question - moving West. Any place West of here is always better than here. As luck would have it, Pa's sister Docia just happens to roll right up to the cabin on her way from Wisconsin to the Dakotas and offers Pa a job working for her husband. It would mean moving the family again, which Pa loves and Ma hates and a $50 per week salary.

When Pa was working as a migrant laborer after the grasshoppers chewed down his spirit and his wheat he was making $1 a day. That's a 10 fold pay increase and frankly, I'd consider moving to South Dakota for that kind of cash.

What do you think Ma?
It seemed a long time before Ma said gently, "Well, Charles, you must do as you think best."
Typical.

Before the word 'best' is even out of her mouth Pa's running across the fields to sell the farm and the house to his Norwegian neighbors, the Nelsons. Then it's time to pack up the wagon cause Pa's leaving in the morning. Jeez, I guess I have to give Pa credit for not being sentimental, but perhaps one should not always be ready to turn one's life upside down with quite so much glee.

The lady Ingalls are going to stay in Wisconsin for a few more months to recover from their respective bouts of scarlet fever and then, because Pa has the wagon, they'll be taking the train to the Dakotas! The train is exciting because it moves a zillion times faster than walking next to a wagon, and also they have a tendency to derail and kill everyone. Sorry did I say exciting? I meant expensive and terrifying.

More on the train ride and the new digs later this week, I just had to get all the depressing news over with first. It's definitely going to take me a moment of silence to accept Mary's blindness but I feel like Laura's setting us up to be happy about the move, so buck up!

PS. There's also a long and drawn out, tear jerking, passage where their dog Jack dies, but I read in that Laura biography that Pa actually sold Jack with the horses when they moved to Plum Creek and I don't appreciate Laura tugging at my heart strings when not necessary.

Answers and Oysters, Delivered

2010-02-01T20:52:00.000-08:00

I believe after finishing On the Banks of Plum Creek, I'm prepared to definitively put to rest one of the central questions of the Little House series; what makes these Ingalls so hard to kill?

As you may remember we previously narrowed the possibilities down to two: they're either machines from the future made out of space age, indestructible, poly-carbons or Pa sold his soul to the devil at the cross roads.

After intensive textural, sub textural and contextual examination of the text I'm prepared to tell you that the Ingalls are machines from the future made out of space-age, indestructible poly-carbons. You're welcome.

Why? Because if Pa sold his soul at the crossroads I feel sure that Satan would have better taken care of his earthly delights. It would be bumper grain yields, yards of calico and Christmas candy for breakfast every day, and that is definitely, definitely, not the case.

You know how Pat Robertson has been telling people that the earthquake in Haiti was caused by a deal the Haitians made with the Devil to help them in the Revolution against the French?

Yeah...uh...so many...just...no.

Well, in Satan's rebuttal in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune he made it crystal clear that that is just not how he rolls.
The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake.

You know Pa would have gotten a golden fiddle out of that deal and yet he has none. Thus they are all machines from the future, which is good because we can officially stop worrying about Laura and her family dying (or burning for eternity in Hell) because they cannot.

Along with that good bit of news, and the grasshopper exodus, things are looking up for the Ingalls. Even better they finally get a fall without 'grasshopper weather'. That's good news because it means no grasshoppers, but unfortunately non grasshoppery weather in Minnesota means consecutive blizzards all winter long.

They're kind of blizzards where you have to tie the clothesline from the house to the barn so you won't get lost and die walking the 30 ft to milk the cows. The kind of blizzards where by the time you get back to the house from the barn the wind has whipped 90% of the milk out of your pail and what's left has frozen to the inside. The kind of blizzards where balls of fire roll down the stove pipe and multiply all over the kitchen floor then disappear for some reason. Or perhaps the kind of blizzards where you start hallucinating balls of fire because you aren't getting any fresh air and the firewood is covered in colorful mushrooms and purple lichens.

Long story short blizzards are bad and every time the livestock needs to be watered or wood needs to be chopped it's a potential near death experience. But in between each blizzard there's a day or two of sunshine which allows for ever more firewood chopping and the opportunity to wash and hang the clothes out to freeze.

During one such sunny, intra-blizzard day before Christmas, Pa decides to head into town. No big deal, town is only 3 miles away but Pa's developed a nasty habit of spinning yarns about children snowed into their houses and frozen solid before their parents can get back from town. These yarns have made Ma a little skittish about Pa taking day drips.
However, as usual, Pa does as he pleases.

What do you know but 3 hours after Pa leaves the worst blizzard of the season hits. Duh. For 4 days Laura, Mary, Baby Carrie and Ma are trapped in the house and Pa's MIA. At first they keep their spirits up by practicing math and spelling and running in place to keep from dying of hypothermia. Pa's the heart of the family though, and more than once the girls are caught crying with their heads on the table when they're supposed to be memorizing bible verses. Crying is shameful. Even for Baby Carrie who's only 2.

I kind of felt bad for them until Pa finally staggers into the house and tells them what he's been up to for the past 4 days. We were all working under the hope that he'd never left the general store in town and was all safe and snuggly by the pot bellied stove, but that would not have been much of a challenge for his space age poly-carbon fibers. Now would it?

No, before Pa made it half way home the blizzard struck. He couldn't see the road or the trees or the house or anything so in order to keep from dying he just walked for 12 hours straight. Then, luckily, he fell into a ravine. With a little protection at his back and covered in his new buffalo coat he fell asleep.

"When I woke up I could hear the blizzard, but faintly. There was solid snow in front of me, coated over with ice where my breath had melted it. The blizzard had filled up the hole I had made when I fell."

For 3 days Pa lived in his snow cave with the blizzard raging above the 4 feet of snow covering him. Pa had gone to town originally to pick up some Christmas treats and over the 3 days he succumbed and ate all the Christmas candy (which you know was only like 12 pieces) and some little oyster crackers. The crazy thing is that he had also picked up a can (ew) of oysters for the family and didn't eat them! Sat for 3 days in a snow cave with only teeny-tiny crackers and a handful of candy to eat and saved the only nourishing, filling item of food.

And he lived! Why? Robot from the future.

Once again, on the Prairie it's a merry Christmas, because even though there's no Christmas candy or little fur capes there is oyster stew and no deaths in the family! Yay!

Disasters I Have Loved

2010-01-27T10:10:00.000-08:00

I know that sounds weird, but some of the natural disasters that befall the Ingalls I would seriously pay money and pop popcorn to experience. Experience in like a 'cultural tourism' kind of way, not a 'willing to give up life and limb' kind of way, of course.

Even though it may seem scary to have a plague of grasshoppers drop out of the sky and descend on your town and eat up your livelihood and force your Pa to walk 500 miles to make a buck and then squirt eggs everywhere...in another way, you're dying to see what that would even look like. Obviously curiosity has forced me to look up approximately 1 million videos of swarming insects. For your enjoyment I have embedded the most beautiful and terrifying at the bottom of this post. Enjoy?

When, as we've been dreading, the pestilent grasshopper eggs hatch the landscape is suddenly full of little tiny, perfect, bouncy, green grasshoppers. Even Laura thinks they're strangely beautiful. Until they eat every living thing that grew back while they were gestating, and become huge and brown and gnarled like their parents. Not as scenic.

So after the brief reprieve of being cute we're back to bummerville. The swarm continues to chew, chew, chew its way through the Prairie, the town and the garden until Ma and Pa and Laura and Mary are driven absolutely bananas. The sound of constant gnawing alone would probably drive you crazy, even if it wasn't your life that was being devoured.
Keep in mind, this has now become an almost 2 year ordeal for Laura & Co.

"Oh, Charles," Ma said one morning, "seems to me I just can't bear one more day of this." Ma was sick. Her face was white and thin and she sat down tired as she spoke. Pa did not answer. For days he had been going and coming with a still, tight face. He did not sing or whistle any more.

(I know what you're thinking. I've either abandoned my resolution to be more upbeat or I'm willfully bumming you out, but this is just context, I swear!)

Just when it seems that even Pa's unsinkable spirit is about to break the weirdest possible thing happens. (Unless you are an entomologist, I guess then it would just seem normal.) One really hot summer morning all the grasshoppers stop hopping and make a shoulder to shoulder (do they have shoulders?) blanket on the ground. For miles! Multiple square mile blanket of grasshoppers. Insanity.

This is just the staging ground though, what happens next is even weirder. On (some mysterious bug) cue all the grasshoppers start walking west, and nothing, NOTHING will stop them. All the grasshoppers East of Plumb Creek just go right ahead and walk into the Creek and drown. Eventually enough of them die to clog up the creek, which is disgusting, and make a corpse bridge for the survivors to cross.

Before the Ingalls' have time to shut their windows the grasshoppers walk right up the wall of their house, through the windows and right over Baby Carrie, who's minding her business sitting in her high chair. That may give you a crawly feeling, but the image of a swarm of grasshoppers going up and over a toddler in a high chair instead of around is kind of hysterical to me. Perhaps because I have no toddlers and have never been visited by a plague.

Why don't they just fly? I don't get it. And they don't just walk west for 20 minutes to get psyched to take off and fly to the next doomed Prairie town. The grasshoppers walk west across Walnut Grove and up and over Laura's house for 4 days. 4 days!

Then just as suddenly as they stopped hopping and started walking, they all take flight, block out the sun and are gone. Weird. Ma's so excited to be grasshopper-less she collapses on her knees and borderline speaks in tongues. Yay! Ma's spirit is saved from the brink of destruction yet again. Just in time. Phew.

Oh, and enjoy the swarming!

Plus here's a bonus swarm of birds. Just for fun.

Let's Try to be Positive, Okay?

2010-01-20T20:28:00.000-08:00

It's been brought to my attention, by me among other people, that these posts are becoming a huge bummer. What with the biblical plague of grasshoppers and the all around child endangerment. While most of the blame should really go to Laura for having such a dangerous and sometimes desperate childhood, I think I could be approaching these catastrophes with a more upbeat delivery.

So, let’s see what we have to work with here... Okay, well some of the grasshoppers haven't survived winter, that's good. Though um, come summer they're really still everywhere and there's a, uh, drought. In fact it's so hot the sap is leaking out of the pine walls and heat or no heat, Mary and Laura still have to wear 3 layers of underwear and high-waisted, long-sleeved dresses.
Wow, this is hard.

Okay, well, the Ingalls' neighbors, the Nelsons, have been helping Ma and the girls out with wood chopping and other Pa duties while Pa's gone looking for work. Good neighbors = good news. Of course because of all the help Laura gets guilted into relinquishing her beloved rag doll, Charlotte, to the Nelson's bratty daughter, Anna. This leads to all night crying binges, but Laura eventually does get Charlotte back!

Turns out that little Norwegian brat likes to play rough. She pulled apart Charlotte's face and discarded her in a puddle. Which froze over. Scrappy Laura was able to chip her little friend out of the ice though, and Ma sewed on new button eyes and a yarn mouth so all was right again, rag doll wise.

While it's good to have your doll back, Pa's been gone for a year and Ma, Baby Carrie, Mary and Laura haven't had a letter from him, and no one knows if he has new shoes or is ever coming home, and he could be dead for all they know!

Okay, just kidding, just kidding! Pa's not dead, he had to walk 300 MFing miles to find work making a dollar a day and 200 miles back but here he is!!!

Laura flew screaming out of bed and screaming down the ladder. She jumped into Pa's arms, and so did Mary. Then what a racket of talking laughing, jumping up and down. Pa's blue eyes twinkled. His hair stood straight up. He was wearing new, whole (!!!!!) boots.

Nothing else bad will ever happen again, EVER, because we're all back together!! Yay! Well nothing bad will happen in this post, because not only is Pa back but its Christmas, and according to Laura, there never was such a Christmas!

Doesn't it seems like it's always Christmas? Weird.

Well Laura was right, there never HAS been such a Christmas because she's about to learn about a little thing called a Christmas tree. It's not your modern Christmas tree, in your house with a Barbie under it, this tree is in Church, but they love Church so it's even better!

The tree has all kinds of wonderous presents under it, like a wooden tub, a shovel and a long-handled pitchfork. Not a lame short handled pitchfork, and awesome long handled one. And of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without mittens.

However, Laura's been to town now and knows that there's more exciting things in life than mittens. Like little fur capes with matching muffs. That stupid bitch Nellie Olson got a little fur cape earlier in the fall and flaunted it in front of Laura while Laura was standing there in her patched dress and too small coat.

...Nellie asked, "Don't you wish you had a fur cape, Laura? But your Pa couldn't buy you one. Your Pa's not a store keeper."

I think Nellie's being raised wrong. If everyone in your town is dying from grasshoppers and drought you should keep your little fur cape to yourself and your huckleberry pie hole shut.

But, OH, there's a fur cape and matching muff on the Christmas tree! I wonder which little girl will be lucky enough to get it?! At first I thought there was no way Laura would because she got mittens (obviously) and a popcorn ball and a little china box with a wee, gold-colored tea pot and gold-colored tiny cup in a gold colored saucer. Kind of a weird gift for an 8 year old, but it's the fanciest thing Laura's ever owned and I DEFINITELY didn't think she would get more than that.

I've come to realize, though, that Christmas will always warm your heart on the Prairie.

Before you know it the Preacher's wife is wrapping the warm fur muff around Laura's neck, and putting the matching muff on her hands. Mary got a new coat and so did Pa and Ma got a big plaid shawl which means no one is freezing to death this winter!!!

If that isn't good news I don't know what is.

"Merry Christmas, Nellie," Laura said. Nellie stared, while Laura walked quietly on, with her hands snuggled deep in the soft muff. Her cape was prettier than Nellie's, and Nellie had no muff.

Ruh-Roh

2010-01-19T09:33:00.000-08:00

Remember all that FORESHADOWING? The trampling cattle and Baby Carrie's torn dress? Sadly these promises of destruction have come to fruition. The good times of going to sleep and knowing you're going to wake up alive in the morning are over.

Steel yourself because things are about to get Biblical out on the banks of Plum Creek.

First, to backtrack and add a little more FORESHADOWING, it's almost harvest time and Pa has grown the most beautiful crop of wheat any Norwegian or Wisconsin with a pioneer spirit ever saw. It's going to be enough to pay off the house he built on loan and make them rich enough to have pork fat at every meal. Forever. Pa's so confident that he uses the family's last 3 pre-harvest dollars to contribute to the town's new church bell instead of buying himself new shoes. As soon as he did that a single tear escaped my eye because I knew we were headed for disaster and Pa was probably about to take a long walk.

One week before harvest a weird cloud moved over the sun, what is that Laura?

It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, but they were larger than snowflakes, and thin and glittering...Plunk! Something hit Laura's head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen. Then huge brown grasshoppers were hitting the ground all around her...They came thudding down like hail.

Like hail! It's hailing huge brown grasshoppers, plague style. They're in Laura's clothes, they fall into the soup Ma's trying to make, they're covering every inch of the ground so it's all squashy and crunchy everywhere you step. That's freaky, and Laura can't sleep at night because she feels all crawly, but the real problem is of course, the wheat crop.

At first Pa's out in the fields trying to smoke them grasshoppers away from the crop but, come on, they're 4 inches deep everywhere for over a week. By the time they're all engorged with the landscape and die there's nothing left of Plum Creek or the town of Walnut Grove. Everything's grey and gross and dry and miserable. Most of the town is moving back east because how exactly are they supposed to survive the winter now?

The worst part is, no one can even plant new crops because the ground is all crammed with grasshopper eggs which are going to hatch just in time to eat anything that grows back.

Now I'd like to chock this up to more Ingalls bad luck but I think we all know that Ingalls bad luck really equals Pa's shitty decision making skills. First of all, he didn't even ask the dude he bought the farm from why he was leaving so hastily. Could it be that the town is cursed by grasshoppers? He was just like, 'Oh, good deal on a sod house, here take my horses and all my money!'

I'm nerdily reading a biography of Laura and in addition to the grasshopper infestation that devastated her family in 1876 there was an almost identical one in Walnut Grove 2 years before. I'm pretty sure anyone in town could have told Pa about it. Infact, like 7 different times in the first half of 'On the Banks of Plum Creek' townsfolk describe the weather as 'grasshopper weather' but the Ingalls are always like, 'That's a funny name, absolutely no need to ask what that means.'

However, knowing Pa can't plan his way out of a wet paper bag doesn't make me feel okay about what's happening to the Ingalls, and Pa especially. With no way to make any money in town Pa must walk (in his old broken shoes!) 'East' till he can find some migrant labor to do. There's no telling when he'll be able to come back or if he'll even find any work. As you know, the telephone, pre-paid phone cards, money orders and labor laws have not been invented yet so it's going to be rough going for all Ingalls.

Sigh. I was just starting to feel optomistic that Laura might get a meal with all 4 food groups in it. I won't make that mistake again.

8 Year Olde Tyme War

2010-01-13T11:35:00.000-08:00

News Flash! It turns out that before she met Pa, Ma was a school teacher. This adds to my over all feeling that Ma grew up all proper and middle class, but got caught up in Pa's very sexy sex appeal. Sounds fun, but before you know it, it's 10 years later and you're living out of a covered waggon, surrounded by wolves, menaced by Indians and making your own brooms. Not sexy.

Though I've always assumed Pa does exactly as he pleases, without regard for Ma, it turns out one of the reasons they moved to Plum Creek was because he promised Ma the girls could be near a school. Pa's stock is creeping back up, and the girls are going to get some book learnin'.

Up to this point, Laura's been living in a bit of a social bubble. Her neighbors have mainly been cattle herders who only speak Norwegian, hostile natives, badgers and prairie hens. Not one of whom could make her feel bad for being the impoverished, though scrappy, country bumpkin she is.
On some level Laura knows that school could shine the harsh reflection of social disapproval on her, and even with all the death facing, she's terrified.

Que Nellie Olson.

Laura's almost 8, but she can't read or do math, she has no shoes, her skirt is too short and worn, and her family is eating river fish exclusively till harvest so she can have a slate for school. She even had to use her own shiny Christmas penny to buy a slate pencil for her and Mary to share.

Nellie Olson, on the other hand, is the richest, prettiest girl in town, her Dad owns the general store and she gets whatever fancy thing she wants. I'm sure she would be positively shocked to learn of the existence of corncob dolls.
Oh, and she's a bitch.

When Laura and Mary go to the store to buy their slate for school (they have to share) they notice a whole huge barrel of the candy they got for Christmas. Keep in mind Laura and Mary got 6 little pieces of this candy and nothing else for Christmas.

Nellie flounced by Mary and Laura, and dug into a pail of candy. Willie (Nellie's brother) dug into the other pail. They grabbed all the candy they could hold and stood cramming it into their mouths. They stood in front of Mary and Laura, looking at them, and didn't even offer them one piece.

That's a Wednesday morning for Nellie, jamming Christmas candy into her maw and making the indigent feel like assholes. Plus she's blond so Laura has a lot of reasons to hate her.

And thus, it's on! Laura, who has a bit of the bitch in her too, and Nellie are now locked in all out, passive aggressive, 8 year, olde tyme war! Wholesome war, but WAR!

Battle Recess: Nellie runs recess like dictator, allowing only 'Ring-Around-the-Rosie' to be played and nothing else. Laura stages a coup and, though her braids do get yanked, by the end of recess the girls are happily playing 'Uncle John'. Nellie on the other hand is in the school house sobbing into her boughten bonnet.

Battle Party: Nellie throws a party at her house, screams at Laura not to touch her doll and embarrasses Laura in front of everyone for not knowing what a rug or lemonade or magazines are.
Man, Laura really is a bumpkin. Just saying, I mean, a rug??

Then Laura and Mary throw a counter party and Laura scares Nellie into the side of the creek that's full of leeches. The other little girls, who've been living under Nellie's tyranny, seem to enjoy this but I have to say, leeches are a little far. Nothing freaks me out more than a blood sucking blob of goo that you can't pull off your foot. Of course in olde tymes leeches are also medicine but, still, gross.

Regardless of my feelings, it's pretty clear that Laura's rebel powers are going to beat out Nellie's rich girl powers in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the little girls of Walnut Grove. I suspect future counter insurgencies but, for now at least, Nellie Olson is in a regroup and retreat pattern. All hail Laura, alpha 1st grader!

Livin' Large, Ingalls Style

2010-01-11T21:12:00.000-08:00

When they left Kansas the Ingalls had nothing. Just their little tin cups, their dog Jack and the pieces of Ma's broken spirit. Moving into an underground house made of dirt in Minnesota was an exciting improvement. Any roof over your head is a good roof, even a steer can fall through it just by walking out to pasture.

Now I've only seen Pa work on their own farm so far, but somehow Santa was able to bring the family 2 horses for Christmas. When Father sold 2 really nice horses on the Wilder's farm they were $200 each. Even if Santa bought 2 shitty horses for the Ingalls, you have to guess they were at least $50 each.
Now I'm an adult and I KNOW that even Santa can't fit 2 horses into his sleigh, so where's the money coming from, Pa?

Since the very 1st day they moved to the sod house Pa's been promising all kind of riches and luxuries once the wheat is planted, harvested and sold. An above ground house, horses, buggies, calico, the whole 9 hectares. I kind of thought this was another one of those promises Pa makes right before they pack up the waggon and head to the Yukon to pan gold, but as soon as the wheat pokes a tendril out onto the Prairie, lumber shows up at the homestead.

He's leveraging the wheat (FORESHADOWING) which makes me nervous but then I don't even have a credit card so any kind of debt freaks me out. I don't have any crops either so I really don't have anything good to borrow against.

The crazy thing is that Pa doesn't just build a house with the lumber, he builds a HOUSE. For Laura's whole life she's only lived in one room cabins, dirt holes or under a tarp by the side of the wagon trail. But suddenly Pa decides they need a 2 story house with 2 rooms on the ground floor! Not just that! Boughten shingles for the roof, boughten doors with boughten hinges, a boughten lock and china door knob!

Guess how many windows?? You'll never guess...okay 6!! 6 glass windows!!

The sod house had one waxed paper window and was underground. They're going from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Clueless here people. It's a very big deal.

The real for real, real, real big deal in the new house is a surprise for Ma, a shiny black cook stove! I'm not even sure what Ma was cooking on in the sod house, but it wasn't a shiny black cook stove. It's actually kind of confusing because when they had Thanksgiving in the sod house Laura said, 'Ma had to stew the goose because there was no fire place and no oven in the little stove.'
What kind of stove? Is there a fire in the house? Don't know.

Regardless, this is going to make a HUGE difference in Ma's day to day. She can be slightly less long suffering!

As proof that Ma will live to happily clean and cook another day, the last thing they set up in the big beautiful clean house is Ma's fragile, china, shepherdess figurine. It's long been used as a symbol of Ma's attempts to keep it civilized amid their abject poverty and as barometer of her emotional state. See if you can catch the subtle way it now represents Ma's renewed spirit.

She had traveled from the Big Woods all the way to Indian Territory, and all the way to Plum Creek in Minnesota, and there she stood smiling. She was not broken. She was not nicked nor even scratched. She was the same little shepherdess, smiling the same smile.

Well, there you go Ma, slap that frozen smile on your face and enjoy your slightly less strenuous life of housework and farm drudgery!

Prairie Paranoia...Prarinoia?

2010-01-11T14:24:00.000-08:00

I don't know, maybe I just see death and destruction and corncob dolls around every corner of the Prairie, but I swear I can smell some foreshadowing cooking.

If you remember it was all picking flowers and sunny days and minnows in the creek when we last saw Laura. Instead of grinning at them through the windows, pointing to his sickle, then at them and giggling, Death has taken a vacation. This put a warm glow in our hearts.

But as soon as you get comfortable, lazy Johnny Johnson falls asleep when he's supposed to be watching his cattle and they go apeshit (cattle-shit) all over the Ingalls hay stack. The haystack was supposed to be a symbol of the family's new bounty and is also, apparently, extremely fun to slide down and jump on.

Ma and Pa and Baby Carrie are in town with the steer when this happens so Laura and Mary have to try to chase the cattle off on their own. Have you ever tried to divert a herd of angry cattle away from your haystack? It's not exactly work for 1st graders. Especially with the 'big and awful horns' and the 'jostling' and 'bawling' and 'trampling'.

But, Laura's a very capable 1st grader. She's faced down death more times than you will in your whole life and she hasn't even learned to spell her name yet. The cattle get chased back out to pasture, Johnny gets cursed, but only some of the hay is saved. Semi victorious, Laura and Mary retire to the sod house to curl up in the fetal position, rock back and forth and await their parent's arrival from town.

Aside: Town is only 3 miles away so it only takes an afternoon instead of 4 days to go and come back like it did in Kansas. This is why Ma and Baby Carrie can tag along and Mary and Laura can be left alone. As usual going to town is such a HUGE deal that Ma wears her Sugar Dance dress, makes a brand new dress for Baby Carie and curls her hair all pretty.

Laura and Mary, still freaked out by the cattle trampling, go up to the road approximately a million times looking for Ma and Pa to come home. Night's falling and they aren't back yet and then, BAM! The waggon's out of control, careening down the path, and about to go into the creek. Jack the dog is barking, Baby Carie is screaming, Pa's being pushed over the bank into the creek! No! Pa! Control the steer, save Ma and Baby Carrie!

And at the last minute he somehow does. Oh, Pa! So hunky and in control. But Baby Carrie's dress is ripped down the center (FORESHADOWING) and everyone's totally freaked out. The girls can hardly even enjoy the maple sugar candy Pa has brought them from town.

In one day, after months of safety and wholesomeness, every single Ingalls is back on the brink of death, the hay for the winter is almost lost, and let's admit it, the steer suck.

I'm just nervous, and winter's coming, but I'm sure everything will be fine. Right? RIGHT???

You're Not Gonna Die!

2010-01-06T12:42:00.000-08:00

Okay, I know I talked a lot of shit on Pa for moving the family around all over the place without checking satellite images from Google maps or even once typing 'Kansas' or 'Minnesota' into Weather.com, but I'm thinking this move is a keeper.

But before I get into why I'd to log the miles the Ingalls have traveled since they left Wisconsin...

It's 626 miles to walk from Pepin, WI where the little house in the big woods was to Independence, KS which was the closest town to the little house on the prairie. Then it's another 514 miles from Independence to Walnut Grove, MN which is where the Ingalls new home is.
Grand total - 1,140 miles traveled. In a waggon.

Obviously that's a lot (especially considering the dog, Jack, had to walk the whole way) but guess what? Their new home in Minnesota is only 190 miles away from where the little house in the big woods was in Wisconsin. You're killing me with the flightiness, Pa. Could we seriously not have cut out the middle man and just moved to Minnesota?

Actually what I was thinking was, if you don't mind packing it up at a moments notice why not move somewhere with nice weather. Got a problem with South Carolina? Kentucky? Tennessee? They're all very beautiful. Plus in Tennessee you have Graceland AND Dollywood. I've been to both and they're both totally worth the drive.

The Ingalls have to take a bit of a step down in Minnesota, literally and figuratively because their new house is a dugout sod house. However at least it's already there (built by Norwegians who Pa says are tidy). Which means they don't have to build a new house and risk crushing their feet and other important appendages. It's underground, has a wax paper window, and their steer stepped through the roof but, whatevs nobody has tried to kill them. Not even once!

Even Ma's happy, she must have found some olde tyme scotch tape (or olde tyme scotch) to fix that broken spirit right up!
At last Ma drew a long breath. "It is all so tame and peaceful," she said. "There will be no wolves or Indians howling tonight. I haven't felt so safe and at rest since I don't know when."

Ah yes, let's all luxuriate in the knowledge that we're not going die during the night. Refreshing!

The rest of the beginning of 'On the Banks of Plum Creek' is filled with the wholesome fun of wading in the creek, playing on a rock, picking flowers and jumping on haystacks. Yay! The Prairie is fun again.

Plus I looked ahead and one of the chapters is titled 'Nellie Oleson'. The bitch is always my favorite. I died a little when Shannen Doherty was kicked off '90210' and I didn't feel right until Tiffani Amber Thiessen joined the cast.

Ma's Broken Spirit

2010-01-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

It's not official, but I think I heard a creaking-cracking sound coming from the vicinity of Ma's soul. Poor, long suffering Ma.

For a second there on the Prairie things were going really well. The Indian war council broke up without any white people being murdered. The Prairie fire actually cut down on the work of plowing the new fields and by the fall the Ingalls were set to have corn, potatoes, cabbage, peas and carrots.

Maybe not that exciting to you but you need to realize that all they've eaten is cornmeal and prairie meat for like a year and a half. (It's not pretty, but think what that would do to your digestive system.)

Yes, according to Laura, they would soon be living like Kings. At first I was like, not really dumbass, but everyone's life was shitty back then so, who knows, maybe. I mean they have the house and a barn and a rocking chair and 3 horses and a cow and now vegetables so that's pretty good for starting with absolutely nothing 12 months ago, right? The girls even both have their own little tin cups to drink from.

Well, don't get excited because one particularly beautiful, early summer morning Mr. Scott and Mr. Edwards show up with a bit of bad news. It seems the 'blasted politicians in Washington' have just informed the settlers that they're 3 miles over the line into Indian Territory. Oh, that's right, they already knew that, which is why they've been calling their new home, 'Indian Territory.' I guess for once though, the US is upholding a treaty with the Native Americans, so soldiers are coming next week to kick the settlers out on their covered wagons.

The Scotts want to stay and fight but right then and there Pa decides, to fuck it all - the Ingalls are leaving in the morning. Sure, that makes sense to me. All you have to do is just move all your stuff 3 miles to the White side of Indian Territory. I mean with a few trips they could even probably dismantle most of the house and keep the animals and...

Um, no, obviously that would be too easy. The Ingalls are moving, ambiguously, North. On the spot Pa gives Mr. Scott the cow and now it's for real for real, the Prairie is dunzo.

Ma didn't say anything. She went into the house and looked around at the dishes not washed and the bed only partly made, and she lifted up both hands and sat down.

That's when I heard the spirit-breaking noise. When they pack up the wagon they take basically nothing they worked all year for. Not the glass windows, the plow, the beds, the rocking chair...nothing. We are starting from scratch people and we don't even know where we're going.

Well we know it will be On the Banks of Plum Creek, but they don't know that! I'm actually more exhausted by the idea of the Ingalls having to start all over again, than I was when Almanzo hefted 27,000lbs of potatoes all over the place. At least the Wilders sold the potatoes and got some money for them. Geez.

Ma sighed gently and said, "A whole year gone Charles." But Pa answered, cheerfully: "What's a year amount to? We have all the time there is."

See, now I'm starting to lean towards indestructible machines from the future, because if you were cursed by the Devil, time would not be on your side.

As they're pulling away from their house on the Prairie, Pa takes extra care to make sure Ma's spirit is nice and broken saying, 'Do you know Caroline...I've been thinking what fun the rabbits will have, eating that garden we planted.' but as usual, she just replies with a limp, 'Don't, Charles'

More spirit crushing to come in the next book, 'On the Banks of Plum Creek'

Indian Territory

2010-01-04T11:12:00.000-08:00

Quick question. If you hated Indians, would you move to a place called 'Indian Territory'?

I just don't really get the whole White settler thing here. Ma calls the Indians, a 'band of shrieking devils' who are always 'under foot' which is weird when you consider that she moved into their neighborhood. The Ingalls' neighbors the Scotts are even worse saying shit like, 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian.' There's really no way to spin that.

Even the Ingalls' dog, Jack, has to be chained up to the house so he doesn't attack passing Indians and spark an interracial, inter species incident.

Just to make matters worse, the Ingalls just happened to build their house next to what's basically a grassy, Native American, interstate highway, which means Indians constantly passing by their cabin. DUH Pa!

This is just part of a pattern that shows how ill informed Pa was when he plopped the family down on the Prairie. He's always like, huh? How did our front door get to be 3 feet from the Indian super highway? Or, how was I supposed to know what the weather was going to be like and that it was constantly going try to kill us?

Would you move to the Prairie if you knew it was going to be like this all winter?
Out in the dark...the wind shrieked and waled and howled. It rattled the door-latch and shook the shutters. It screamed down the chimney and the fire roared and flared.

Or if, say, you knew there was going to be a war council meeting down by the creek where hundreds of Indians were going to spend the week deciding whether or not to massacre you in your home?

The drums seemed to beat in Laura's head. They seemed to beat deep inside her. The wild, fast yipping yells were worse than wolves. Something worse was coming, Laura knew it. Then it came- the Indian war-cry.
A nightmare is not so terrible as that night was ...this was real and Laura could not wake up.

Probably not.

Now, I know there wasn't the Internet or trip planner or yelp, or satellite images from Google in olde tyme. I'm sure the most current maps were illustrated with topless 16 year old Indian princesses and other distracting data points and I know Pa couldn't check out the Prairie's free alternative weekly (the Grassy Expanse) before he moved, but seriously.
All these information gaps really put the all caps on BAD IDEA JEANS. Or italics, or whatever you like to use to emphasize when moving from Wisconsin is the wrong choice.

The misinformation only gets worse (which I'll cover in the next post) but for now let's add some notches to our near death bed post! Whee!!

7. Prairie Fire! The Prairie's made up of super dry, super long grass which ignites if a settler so much as looks askance at a campfire. One button eye and before you know it there's a raging inferno on the horizon and all the bunnies and prairie hens are running for the creek. For all Pa's faults he's a man of action and he came up with a plan involving plowing and mini fire setting which saved the cabin and their lives. Score for Pa.
Missed death: burned alive, yikes!

8. The loose panther. (not that kind of loose) Panthers only eat kids so this only counts for Laura and Mary and especially Baby Carrie. Luckily an Indian dad kills the panther so everyone's safe.
Missed death: Carried away and eaten by a cat.

9. I'm just going to mention Indians again because they're a constant threat. They come in and out of the house as they please taking food and whatever else they want. Plus, theres that 'Indian Jamboree' (Laura's words) that was really the war council to decide if whitey killing was the right political course to take. For some reason one of the Osage chiefs convinced the other tribes not to do this so crisis averted. Stupid mid term elections gumming up the political process.
Missed death: murder at any moment. It's like being on the extras list for Law and Order.

Check It Out...

2010-01-04T10:48:00.001-08:00

Real Prairie goodness (acutally more Praire badness) later today, but if you've time to waste (which you obviously do because I know that the Little House on the Prairie books are probably as intregal to your job as they are to mine) check out my guest top 10 post on Rarely Wrong Erin.

Actually check out all the guest posts and then get all up in Erin's writing too. You will not regret it!!!

Not in Time for Christmas...Christmas!

2009-12-30T10:06:00.001-08:00

Do you have a little more Christmas cheer left in you? Because I have a very Prairie Christmas story for you today.

Just think of it like when your old coworker takes you out to dinner the week after your birthday. It's nice, right?

Actually this story doesn't start nice at all. The outlook for our 1st Christmas on the Prairie is as bleak as they come. First there's no way Santa is going to find Mary and Laura. They are, as previously stated, in the middle of no where.

Plus even if Santa could find the girls how is he going to get to them? Apparently the technology that allows Santa's reindeer to fly hasn't been invented yet, so all kinds of practical concerns are in play. By December 24th it hasn't snowed on the Prairie and as everyone knows (or knew) Santa can only travel in the snow. Duh, that's what the reindeer are for. Worse! Its rained so much that the creek's risen to the point where Santa couldn't cross it even if it was snowing and he did know where they were. This is a real Santa head scratcher.

Obviously the real problem here is that Pa had to move the family all over the place for no reason and now they're wasting money on corn meal and nails and pork fat and staying alive so they don't have money for extravagances like peppermint sticks and yarn for mittens.

They were lucky little girls, to have a good house to live in, and a warm fire to sit by, and such a turkey for their Christmas dinner. Ma said so, and it was true. Ma said it was too bad that Santa Claus couldn't come this year, but they were such good girls that he hadn't forgotten them...

At this point I stated to get a little mad at Pa again and no amount of beard tickling or fiddle playing can change my mind. Mary and Laura could NOT have lower expectations for Christmas. Literally a mitten each would have sufficed but OH NO! We just have to uproot the whole family and move to 'Indian Country'.

Don't be like me and get too upset though because then the most touching thing ever happens.

Background: The Ingalls, even though they're in the middle of no where, are part of a loose confederation of white settlers. This is how Pa almost killed Mr. Scott with a natural gas leak while digging the new well and how his wife, Mrs. Scott was able to save the Ingalls from Fever'n'Ague.

There's also a bachelor, Mr. Edwards living near by who's helped with some of the Ingalls building projects and has been somewhat adopted by the family. Cynic (or realist) that I am, I've always been wary of Mr. Edwards. I know this is a wholesome tale, but a single man out on the Prairie could get very lonely and might take advantage of a female Ingalls while Pa's away.

But now I feel guilty for thinking it.

Mr. Edwards had been invited over to share Christmas dinner with Ingalls but the same dang swollen creek that's keeping Santa from getting to the cabin is posing a similar problem for Mr. Edwards. Which means no gifts, no guests, and let's just admit it, no Christmas.

Christmas Eve the Ingalls are all moping around with a tear in each eye about how un-festive their Christmas is this year. Pa won't even play the fiddle! They go to bed crying all over thier pillows but when they wake up, Mr. Edwards is there and he has presents! Yay!

For the record, Mr. Edwards wadded through the creek (NAKED) holding his clothes, the presents and 7 sweet potatoes over his head to keep them dry. In December!

He makes up story about how he ran into Santa in Independance (the closest town), and Santa was all bummed that he couldn't get to the Ingalls' house to deliver presents so he asked Mr. Edwards to do it for him. How cute is Mr. Edwards?

The best part is he totally one ups Ma and Pa and brings the little girls pepermint sticks, little heart shaped cakes (made with real white sugar!) and most amazingly, their own little tin cups to drink out of. This is exciting because up till now Laura and Mary have had to share a tin cup, though Baby Carrie has her own. Again, don't try to do Prairie math, it's not worth it. Oh wait! I forgot! Laura and Mary both got a shining bright new penny!

They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny. Think of having a whole penny for your very own. Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny.
There had never been such a Christmas.

See what I mean about having the lowest possible expectations? Congratulations Mr. Edwards, you're a real pioneer hero. Now please try to go the rest of the book without shooting an Indian or saying anything racist.
Thank you.

Happy New Year pals, I'll see you on the other side!

Cheating Death...Again

2009-12-29T09:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm officially over worrying about the Ingalls.

They are clearly either machines from the future made out of space age, indestructible, poly-carbons or Pa sold his soul to the devil at the cross roads. (Not sure which...YET).
Nothing the Prairie throws at them can kill them, and the Prairie is trying, believe me.

Let's take a look at our handy near death experience counter, shall we? Remember we're only up to page 200 so the counter is far from complete.

1. Crossing the frozen Mississippi River mere hours before the ice started melting and breaking up. Missed death: drowning and freezing at the same time. Ingalls-cicles.

2. Forging an unnamed creek that almost pulled them, their horses and their wagon under water. They even thought their poor little dog, Jack, drown but he found them a few days later.
Missed death: either dashed on the rocks or drowned.

3. When Pa led the pack of enormous wolves to the new cabin and they surrounded it howling all night. That one was especially chilling.
Then all around the house the circle of wolves pointed their noses toward the sky and answered him. their howls shuddered throught he house and filled the moonlight and quaverd away accross the vast silence of the prairie.
Missed Death: Wolf chow.

4. Natural gas leak in the new well. The well only menaced Pa and his neighbor, Mr. Scott, but it's pretty clear that if Pa dies they're all totally screwed. Missed death: asphyxiation for Pa, any number of Prairie deaths for Laura, Mary, Ma and baby Carrie.

5. Indians stroll in to the cabin while Pa's out hunting. Ma was smart enough to make them corn bread and give them all of Pa's tobacco but if those Indians could have seen into the future they would definitely have killed all those Cracker settlers. Missed death: murder!

And coming in at #6, my favorite by far....Fever'n'Ague! Which is Prairie speak for Malaria. ALL the little white settler families get Fever'n'Ague at the same time from the crazy mosquitoes that swarm Kansas in the late summer.

Since this is, as you may remember, olde tymes, nobody thinks Fever'n'Ague is caused by mosquitoes, but there are two very scientific prairie theories behind the cause. It's definitely contracted from either breathing night air (??????) or eating watermelons. That makes sense right? Either way watermelons are out because, as Ma says, '...watermelons grow in the night air.'

But, uh, doesn't everything grow in the night air at least half the time Ma?

Luckily, the Ingalls are eventually saved by their neighbor Mrs. Scott and a Black doctor with the unfortunate name of Mr. Tan.

While they can't die, their poly-carbon fibers and Satan-cursed bodies can be weakened, and Pa takes the opportunity while they're a-healin' to make Ma a nice rocking chair. Proving how little there is to celebrate on the Prairie, when it's finished the Ingalls throw a party. Ma puts on her best apron and gold pin and Pa puts the bed pillows and quilt on the rocking chair and sits Ma in it with Baby Carrie.

"Oh, Charles, I haven't been so comfortable since I don't know when"
Sitting in a comfortable chair and holding a baby while recovering from Malaria is the best thing that's happened to Ma since they left Wisconsin.

I checked, and while there are such promising chapter titles as 'A Scream in the Night', 'Prairie Fire', 'Indian War Cry' and 'Soldiers' coming up, none of the chapters in 'Little House' is 'Ma's Broken Spirit'. We'll probably have to wait till 'The Long Winter'.

Already terrified.

THANK YOU!!

2009-12-29T09:36:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to give a big THANK YOU to Michelle from The Worst of the Worst of Fan Fiction, Sadako at Dibbly Fresh, Ali at My Travel Rambling, BSC AG and Shannon SVH from Coffee at Lukes and Shannon Sweet Valley High for all my Beautiful Blogger awards!

You're all my favorite commentors with my favorite blogs and you all look amazing when you wake up in the morning!

Don't worry, I'll be posting today about how the Ingalls must practice some black magic because you CAN NOT KILL THEM!

Service Disruption

2009-12-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

Hey pals, I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to be visiting my family in Philadelphia this week so posting may be a little on the sporadic side. However my mom and sister are big Prairie fans so they may be pressuring me into posting.

Either way, have a great week of celebrating whatever you like. I hope you all get corncob dolls, peppermint sticks and something to make your jerk cousin jealous in your stockings!

Yeah, I'm Impressed, So?

2009-12-16T14:26:00.000-08:00

Is moving out to the middle of Kansas crazy?
Yes, duh. Like I said before, the Ingalls could all die in a million different ways and no one would ever know and they would just be another pioneer statistic.

However, I kind of have to give it to Pa and the whole Ingalls clan; when they dismantled the covered waggon and set up camp they were cooking over a campfire and sleeping under a tarp. They had nothing! Laura and Mary had to share a little tin cup to drink their water out of.
For some reason baby Carrie gets her own tin cup, I don't know, some kind of weird Prairie math.

Anyway, everything the Ingalls need for their new house they have to make out of whatever's lying around on the Prairie. When Ma wants to sweep the floor she needs to make a willow branch broom. I seriously get upset if I have to buy a new shower caddy after a move.

Obviously, the most important thing they need to make is their new house. Luckily, out of no where, Pa's a master craftsman and the strongest man alive. He built the house, with a roof, a door that locks AND a fireplace with just a hatchet, 3 river stones, 10 buckets of mud and 5 nails. He even put down flooring!

I have to admit, my Pa crush might be surging back to life, and my fear for the children's lives is, correspondingly, waning. I mean, Laura lived long enough to write all these books, right? She's fine.

I blushed a little reading about Pa splitting logs for the cabin's floor.

All the way up the log Pa fought the tough oak. He struck with his ax into the crack. He drove blocks of wood into it, and moved the iron wedge higher...He swung the ax high, and brought it down with a great swing and a grunt from his chest.

Hee, oh Pa! I could watch you split logs all day. It's the porn of the Prairie. Well it's more porny than counting gophers anyway.

I'm hot for Pa but I'm starting to feel worse and worse for Ma. Maybe it's because I did the math and I'm the same age she was when they left Wisconsin, but it's also pretty clear that she is NOT the decider in this relationship. Pa's charismatic and fun and flighty and independent and Ma just kind of accepts whatever shit sandwich life hands her. I mean, Pa didn't even ask her if she wanted to move to Kansas! He just said, 'Seeing you don't object, I've decided to go see the West.' and she just said, 'Oh, Charles.'

I feel like there's actually going to be a chapter called, 'Ma's Broken Spirit'. If there is, I'll let you know.

Parenting Styles

2009-12-15T14:12:00.000-08:00

So, historically, we've loved Pa and hated Father, right.
Pa plays the fiddle and tells funny stories and sometimes won't shoot a deer if it's too cute. Father's main parenting style is to crush your spirit with hard work and if that doesn't work well, then you suck.

But I'm starting to see a new kind of child abuse flourish on the road to 'Indian country'. First of all Pa nearly gets the whole family killed twice by page 24. 'Little House on the Prairie' is 355 pages long, so that's not good.

Actually, if you count when Pa accidentally led the mammoth pack of wolves back to the homestead and they circled the cabin howling and snarling all night, then it would be 3 near death experiences. Personally, I count that one.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Long story short, the Ingalls chewed up the Kansas non scenery for about a month and then out of no where Pa's like, this is it, our new farm. I can't decide if it's totally ballsy or terrifying or stupid or what, but out in the middle of NO WHERE they dismantle the wagon, light a fire and call it home.

It was strange and frightening to be left without the waggon on the High Prairie. The land and the sky seemed too large, and Laura felt small.

Duh, you're no where, Laura. No one you know could find you, you could die in a 1000 different ways and no one would even know. Sorry to be alarmist, and I understand there's a certain pioneer spirit at work here, but this move is crazy town. Were there no sparsely populated areas of Wisconsin to move to? When Ma and Pa were building the walls of the new log cabin and Ma's foot got crushed, my first thought was you are all FUCKED if one of the adults die.
Don't worry she's okay. And sorry about the cursing.

Ma's not so stellar with the parenting either, believe me. Whenever Pa almost kills the whole family Ma's like, 'Oh Charles.' and then ties on Mary and Laura's nightcaps and tells them not to have nightmares. No problem Ma. It's just that the house is surrounded by a pack of wolves and our front door is a hole with a quilt draped over it.

Lastly, I don't know if you'd characterize this as bad parenting but the Ingalls family is not really the kind of family that celebrates Indigenous People's Day instead of Columbus day. Their views on Native Americans differ but none of them are what you might call, correct.

Laura's excited to see the Indians and looks to Pa for more info because, 'Pa knew all about wild animals, so he must know about wild men too.'
Laura semi gets a pass because she's 6 (though the book was written when she was in her 70's) but Ma straight up hates Indians, why Ma?
'I just don't like them; and don't lick your fingers Laura.'

Ma and Pa are betting that the US government will just go ahead and turn all of Kansas into settlements and move the Native Americans out.
Yep, I don't foresee any hitches that genius plan.

I Miss the Big Woods Pt. 2

2009-12-12T17:54:00.000-08:00

Welcome back to Ingalls-wood hommies, but don't get too comfortable because Pa's a little flighty and we're packing up moving to 'Indian Territory'.
Laura's even promised she'll get to see a papoose, which according to Pa is, '...a little, brown Indian baby.'

I see that racial insensitivity will not be one of the items left in the little house when the Ingalls pack up their covered wagon. FORESHADOWING!

See, Pa is like a wild animal, and wild animals can't live crowded in by humans. While we were reading 'Farmer Boy' the path to the Little House became a proper road. Almost weekly a carriage passes within 300 yards of the Ingalls' front lawn! Stupid gentrification. Next thing you know you're getting offers for weekend delivery of the Times and the General Store in Pepin is carrying 6 different kinds of cream cheese and grass fed beef.
Well, 'grass fed' was really the only way they did it back then so that's not really a sign of gentrification, but still.

Pa's desire to howl at the moon in privacy means leaving their entire extended family behind in Wisconsin but for some reason it's always anthropomorphism that brings a tear to my beer:

The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under. And that was the last of the little house.

Step one, almost die crossing the Mississippi, because the ice is melting, then it's through to Minnesota and Iowa and Missouri and all the way to Kansas. (Driving from Pepin, WI to Topeka, KS is 518miles, but I suspect they may have had to take a slightly different route. What with there being no highways.)

Kansas super freaks Laura out which I can relate to. Sorry people from Kansas, but if you aren't used to that kind of WIDE openness it's a little on the eeire and monotonous side. I drove through Kansas with my Mom a couple years ago right after reading 'In Cold Blood' and even though we were in a car and it only took 2 days, the landscape gave me a continuous case of both the heebies and the jeebies. There's no where to hide, people, not even like a ditch!
Also, my Mother got pulled over for speeding in Kansas. Just FYI.

More travel tips to come...

FINALLY!

2009-12-09T14:17:00.000-08:00

"Almanzo took another big mouthful of pie. He could not speak till he was spoken to, but he thought to himself that he was old enough to know he'd rather be like Father than like anybody else."

This is really all you need to know about 'Farmer Boy'. Almanzo loves to eat, he's mindlessly obedient and worships the ground Father walks on.

Child abuse notwithstanding there have been a number of signs that Father's developing some respect for and trust in Almanzo. Of course he expresses his admiration with more hard labor and willful disregard for Almanzo's safety but none the less, it's expressed.

First Father got Almanzo a calf yoke for his birthday which means he could start breaking his own calves. Then when the cobbler came, Father had him make boots for Almanzo, which are men's shoes, unlike moccasins which are for babies. Then, after proving he could do the most basic math, Father lets Almanzo effectively drop out of school so he can load timber (which I refuse to talk about) and bale hay. All signs point to parental affirmation!

The trip to town (which sealed the affirmation deal) to sell the baled hay led to an almost madcap series of events. Madcap I tell you. It was all set into motion when eagle eyed Almanzo spots a lost pocketbook crammed with cash on the road to town. After haggling over hay bale prices in town Father sends Almanzo to find the pocket book's owner, the stingy, mean spirited, old Mr. Thompson.

Almanzo finds him in the Wheelwright's store and as a thank you for the return of his $$ Mr. Thompson insinuates that Almanzo might have stolen some of it.
What?! How dare you sir?
The only thing Almanzo hates more than dinner served late and having his bragging thwarted, is having his integrity called into question. The Wheelwright, Mr. Paddock doesn't like it too much either and threatens to pound old Mr. Thompson like a cake unless he gives Almanzo $200 as a reward.
Which he does and now Almanzo is rich!

But threats of physical violence and extortion aren't all that Mr. Paddock has up his sleeve, he tells Father he wants to take Almanzo on as an apprentice! Now wheelwrights were kind of like the business developers of the 19th century. You make bank but you're constantly sucking up to someone to get it.

Father and Mother hash it out at the dinner table, children don't speak at the dinner table, or any other time they aren't spoken to. Should Almanzo go to town and be a fancy pants wheelwright, or stay on the farm and become a man? After a long argument that leaves Mother in tears, Father does something way uncharacteristic; he asks Almanzo what he'd like to do with his life.

What does Almanzo what? Duh, he wants to be exactly like Father, eating the potatoes he has hoed and harvested and lugged to multiple locations. Lord of the land, beholden to no man.

His reward for choosing correctly? OMG Father gives him a colt, not just a colt, the colt of his dreams, Starlight.

"Father!" Almanzo gasped. "For my very own?"
"Yes son. You can break him, and drive him, and when he's a four-year-old you can sell him or keep him...We'll take him out on a rope, first thing tomorrow morning, and you can begin to gentle him"

And yay, all's well that ends well.
So long Father, you will not be missed.

So next up is 'Little House on the Prairie'. I can only assume it's the best one because that's the book they based the TV show on, and TV is always right.

Father, #1 on my Shit List

2009-12-09T13:07:00.001-08:00

I absolutely refuse to comment on the lumber hauling incident in the woods...

Except to say that Father's parenting style is extremely suspect and would have left me sobbing, waist-deep in snow. And my oxen probably wouldn't have made it either. Don't worry though, after 3 days Almanzo, 'hardly limped at all.'

I keep thinking, the next entry will be the last but this book NEVER ends. However the next entry will be the last. All of Almanzo's hard work and Father-minding will finally pay off in an exciting (for olde tymes) series of events.

What do you think about all of Almanzo's hard work Father??

"Many a good beginning makes a bad ending. It remains to be seen how he turns out in the long run."

Another great moment in parenting. Someone email Cliff Huxtable that he's got some serious competition.

Christmas!! Just in Time for Christmas!

2009-12-07T14:16:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you, compared to the Ingalls, it's like the Wilders wake up inside FAO Schwartz on Christmas morning. Yes, Almanzo & Co. get mittens and candy too, but they hold mittens and candy in about as high a regard as you or I would. 'Oh, mittens, thanks. Yeah, I totally needed some mittens so these will be really handy. I'll just put them over here with the candy that Susan from accounting gave me.'

Almanzo gets two real gifts this Christmas. The first thing he pulls out of his stocking (which is actually one of his stockings) is a 'store boughten hat'. If you remember, cousin Frank had a boughten hat last winter that threw Almanzo into a fit of jealousy and thwarted his bragging about Father's horses. Nobody thwarts Almanzo's bragging and gets away with it!!

Everytime cousin Frank and Almanzo have had to interact this year its inevitably devolved into an all out battle between the values of farm vs. town. Almanzo is loath to see rich town kids come out on top. He MUST assert the superiority of rich farm kids.

Almanzo's second gift is a jack knife with 4, count em 4, blades. (Quatro!) He just happens to know that cousin Frank's jack knife only has 3 blades. Oh, this is going to be so sweet when all the relatives get here and Almanzo has a chance to rub the extra blade and the brand new boughten hat in cousin Frank's smug townie face.

Actually at 1st Almanzo's manages to play nice with all the cousins. He even lets them scratch his pig Lucy's back with a corn cob (or as Laura would call it, doll) but before long cousin Frank and Almanzo are scrapin' and wrestlin' in the barn over who has the best demeanor with the colts.
Ironically, making a ruckus in the barn is very bad for colts.

Things simmer down once Christmas dinner begins due to the seriousness with which everyone attends to and describes their food. (I won't go into the Christmas meal food porn but know that a whole pig was roasted along with upwards of 60 other animals.)
However, I knew the shit was gonna go down once the kids decided on an after meal snowball fight.

"Headlong they ('Manzo and Frank) went into the deep snow...Almanzo's face was covered with snow and his mouth was full of it, but he hung to Frank and kept hitting him...Frank's head hit him in the nose, and it began to bleed. Almanzo didn't care. He was on top of Frank, hitting him as hard as he could in the deep snow. He kept saying 'Holler 'nuff! Holler 'nuff!'"

FYI 'hollering 'nuff' is olde tyme speak for saying uncle. And evenutally Frank, candy-ass town boy that he is, does indeed end up hollering 'nuff'.

In case you're keeping score
Wilder presents > Ingalls presents.
Store boughten hats > Mother-made hats.
Hand threshing > machine threshing.
Hard work > thumb twiddling.
Making soap out of waste beef fat > getting an education.
Want to scald someone with a starch? Do it in the past.
AND, most importantly rich farm boys rule, where as rich town boys drool.

Threshin'

2009-12-06T20:51:00.000-08:00

I just want to warn you that this whole post is an excuse to share some threshing porn.
No seriously.

So for the record Pa Ingalls (Laura's Pa) is a modern man when it comes to threshing, and pays the men who come around with the threshing machine to thresh his wheat. It cuts threshing time from all winter to one afternoon.
No brainer right?

Unless you're Almanzo's father. What say ye Father?

"All it saves is times, son. And what good is time, with nothing to do? You want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, all these stormy winter days?"

Obviously thumb twiddling or hand-threshing are the only options. As we know, for Father, the work is it's own reward.

So, how will Laura and Almanzo ever get together when they come from such ideologically divergent backgrounds?? Can we get another threshing opinion? A tie breaker?

My mind, obviously, went to Emil Zola's 'The Earth', part of a 20 book series about French life in the second half of the 19th century. Keep in mind this no dime romance novel, Zola's just a man who knows how to grab a girl's attention.

Here's a dirty little threshing scene between the farmer Buteau and his wife's sister Francoise.

"Francoise's cheeks were flushed, her wrists swollen, her skin burning; her body, all aglow, set the air quivering all around her. She was breathing heavily through her open mouth...At each upward swing of the flail, her right knee tightened her skirt and her taut round breast and hip pressed against the materials so that all the curves of her sturdy body were revealed as though she were naked. One of the buttons of her bodice had torn off. Beneath the tan of her neck, Buteau could see her white flesh swelling with each swing of her arms and strong, muscular shoulders. It seemed to make him more excited, like a lustful woman thrusting and wriggling; and the flails kept going, the hail of grain danced under the thwack-thwack of the two panting threshers."

Phew! I'm going to go ahead and put Zola in the pro thresh-by-hand camp, giving thresh-by-hand the clear win.

Not that it matters, no one does that any more. Like I said I just wanted to share a little threshing porn on a Monday. So, you're welcome.

Should I be Jealous?

2009-12-04T11:18:00.000-08:00

Each Wilder gets a new pair of custom hand-made shoes each year. You know that sounds dope.

It's kind of a weird system, buying shoes on the farm. Each year, after harvest, the cobbler comes to stay at your house and makes a new pair of shoes for each member of the family. Friendly-like. But you don't get a new pair until he stops by. By the time the cobbler comes to the Wilders in the fall of 1866 Almanzo's moccasins are in tatters and Royal's feet have grown so much he's had to make slits into the sides to accomidate his bulging toes. I am definately not jealous of having only one pair of shoes at a time that may or may not still fit me.

But custom made shoes!

I also can't tell if I'm jealous that Eliza Jane and Alice get to leave the farm to go to the Academy durring the winter. They're not there to read Proust (who won't even be born for 5 more years) they're there to learn to be ladies. Their classes are like, deportment and needlework. I know it's so wrong but I have to admit it sounds like a fun way to spend the winter. In my fantasy it's a bunch of girls sitting around the fireplace, gossiping and making samplers while one girl plays the piano forte and the house mother only interupts to brings you gingerbread men and hot cider. I'm picturing olde tyme Facts of Life.

I think these books are twisting my brain.

Pride. Honor. Pumpkins.

2009-12-02T21:01:00.000-08:00

As promised, Almanzo experiences some joy at the county fair! This is not hard for me to believe because I LOVE county fairs. LOVE!
I got my 'Beer Drinker's Make Better Lovers" license plate holder at the Alameda County Fair.

Okay, to give you a little background Almanzo's been growing what he hopes will be a prize winning pumpkin all summer. Father taught him this weird technique for growing huge pumpkins which involves siphoning milk into the pumpkin with a candle wick. While I'm 100% on board with Almanzo having a good day I have to say that this system stinks a little of rich boy advantage. Who but a rich kid could waste gallons of milk on a pumpkin he isn't even going to eat?

You have to think 1860's times. You can't just run to the corner and get a gallon for 2 bucks. You need a cow, multiple cows.

Okay that's the last thing I'll say against Almanzo. For now.

After a summer of growing a freakish gourd it's finally time to flaunt it at the fair. But, UGH! Almanzo has to wait till the second day of the fair for the pumpkin judgement. Luckily there's lots to keep the Wilders busy on the 1st day of the fair. Mother and the girls get to spend all day cooking in the church kitchen and Almanzo gets to appraise horse flesh with Father, get hoodwinked by shysters, run crying from a mule and eat up the food that Mother and the girls have spent all day cooking.

I know I've mentioned the food porn in 'Farmer Boy' before but you just have to check this:

"(Almanzo) ate ham and chicken and turkey, and dressing and cranberry jelly; he ate potatoes and gravy, succotash, baked beans and boiled beans and onions, and white bread and rye'n'injun bread, and sweet pickles and jam and preserves.

Then he drew a long breath, and he began to eat pie, he wished he had eaten nothing else. He ate a piece of pumpkin pie and piece of custard pie, and he ate almost a piece of vinegar pie. He tried a piece of mince pie, but could not finish."

No shit, really?
PS. Yes vinegar pie is as disgusting as it sounds.

Okay, day 2, this is where the pumpkin magic is about to go down. Did I have to sit through 4 pages of corn kernel, rutabaga and onion peel judging before the pumpkins were up? Yes. But then I realized that corn kernel judging was probably the Top Chef marathon of its day. Judge not, lest ye pumpkins be judged, people. By the way, did you know that the best part of the potato is next to the skin and is best viewed though paper thin slices held up to the light?

"At last the judges came to the pumpkins. Almanzo tried to look as if he didn't care much, but he felt hot all over."

It was kind of touch and go for a sec because though Almanzo's wonder pumpkin was definitely the biggest (rich boy milk) it was a little paler on the inside than the others. Also, they judge the pumpkins by splitting them open with a hatchet.
So much violence in this book.

Just when Almanzo is about to faint in anticipation of the dream of happiness he dare not dream, the judge leans over and stabs the blue ribbon in Almanzo's pumpkin. Yay, best pumpkin of the whole year!!!!! Then the best, most prefect possible thing happens; Father proudly claps Almanzo on the shoulder. Oh happy day! Validation! For someone with daddy issues a proud clap on the shoulder is like winning a CMA or a Pulizer. Seriously.

Of course Alice and Eliza kind of steal Almanzo's thunder by winning blue ribbons in wool work and jellies. Father has only SO MUCH pride to go around girls, stop hogging.

Lastly, on the subject of gourds, I highly suggest renting the documentary 'Lords of the Gourd'. Humongous pumpkin technology has come a long way in 150years.

Historical vs. Modern Food Fights

2009-12-02T12:43:00.000-08:00

Oh how the times they have changed. In 1866 Almanzo got hit in the face by a projectile, scalding potato. For his trouble he got a kerchief tied around his blistered face, a kick in the pants and 12 more hours of potato harvesting. (don't worry though, Mother eventually tied on a poultice to his head and the next day, 'it did not hurt so much')

Last weekend a man hit his sister in the face with a recently microwaved pecan pie and has been charged with aggravated assault!

The moral: Do not attempt Little House on the Praire at home! Serious injury slash prison time may result.

No Moment of Decadence Goes Unpunished

2009-11-30T20:51:00.000-08:00

The Almanzo abuse is getting hard to document people. I kind of get depressed when I think about what I have to talk about today. Sigh.

Yes, as you've probably already guessed, it's potato harvesting time. You may remember the fun the children had in the spring hauling 27,000lbs of potatoes from the basement to the wagon for sale to the New York potato buyers. Well now it's time for the fun of harvesting 27,000lbs of potatoes and hauling them to the basement for storage and sale to the New York potato buyers.

When Almanzo's up before dawn in the frost, pulling potatoes till his hands are too numb to hold them, he turns in to a kind of stoner poet:

"My nose is so cold. We have ear-muffs. Why can't we have nose muffs?"
It's called a woolen veil Almanzo. Too bad you think they're only for girls.

However in classic Father form Father just tells Almanzo and Alice to work harder, let the child labor keep them warm. Sadly, no amount of aerobic stooping can keep the children warm this pre dawn and Father grudgingly agrees to waste a match making a bonfire of potato tops. I was actually kind of surprised that they didn't use the potato tops to make pickles or sour kraut or hats or something. Wasteful.

But before too long Almanzo's not satisfied with the warm glow in the middle of the field, now he's hungry. After only 5hr of work! Father, again showing his soft side, tells Almanzo to shove some potatoes in the fire to roast. Poor freezing, 9 YEAR OLD Almanzo tarries by the fire to wait for the potatoes to bake even though he knows he should never, never stop digging potatoes, even for 4 minutes.

Punishment is swift.

"Suddenly he heard a soft, hissing puff, and something hit his face. It stuck on his face scalding hot. He yelled and yelled. The pain was terrible and he could not see."

The fucking potato exploded in the fire and hit him in the face.
Father basically just spits in his kerchief and wraps it around the kid's head. They are not allowed to make another potato. He and Alice can share the remaining, unexploded potato but then they must get right back to work.

"Almanzo hadn't know that anything could hurt like that burn...He was not crying; only tears kept running of of his eyes and down inside his nose."

Okay, I have 2 pieces of good news. One, this book is almost over and we'll be back to Ma and Pa and Laura and Mary soon! Two, something good is about to happen to Almanzo at the County Fair. I promise.

Putting the 'Man' and the 'Wild' in Almanzo Wilder

2009-11-24T22:19:00.000-08:00

Nothing in 'Farmer Boy' has shocked me more (and there's been both attempted murder and woolen veils) than when Mother and Father casually mentioned they'd be going on vacation.

Vacation?! They don't even take 8 hour vacations to sleep at night.
I mean they aren't going on a carnival cruise to Ft. Lauderdale, just 10 miles to Uncle Andrew's, but leaving the farm is just crazy town.

Actually crazy town is just the 1st stop this trains making. The elder Wilders are making the classic mistake of all after school specials that don't involve eating disorders or suicide; leaving the kids home alone. But whatever, after school specials haven't been invented yet!

After a few reminders to churn the butter (Not too much salt, use the nice molds) and not to eat all the sugar, the parents are OUT.
"Nobody said anything. Even Eliza Jane (she's the bossy one) looked a little scared....Suddenly Almanzo threw his hat into the air and yelled. Alice hugged herself and cried: 'What do we do first'"

For a second I thought this chapter was going to be all about how hard the kids worked while their parents were gone but I was pleasantly surprised to see them get a little wild in the absence of authority. Well wild for them. It was no House Party or House Party II or even House Party III, but they did make a LOT of ice cream.

Thank god they cut all that ice out of the pond in winter because now all they have to do is dig the ice out of the ice house, bring it to the house in a wheel barrow, put it in a grain sack, crush it with hatchets, pack it all all around some custard and 3 short hours later, ice cream! Ah the sweet brain freeze of freedom!

Their rebellion seems to be mainly sugar based, with some light chore shirking mixed in. In addition to ice cream, they bake multiple cakes and even pull taffy. (All of which seems like a lot of work to me.) Almanzo also takes the opportunity to spoil his little piglet, Lucy. Lucy gets to eat not just watermelon rinds (which are usually used to make pickled watermelon rinds (ew)) but also some of the pulled taffy.

Sadly, there's a reason you don't normally see taffy being fed to pigs.

"Next morning when Almanzo started to do chores, Lucy was standing in the yard. Her tail hung limp and her head hung down. She did not squeal when she saw him. She shook her head sadly and wrinkled her nose."

Aw, the taffy glued her poor little pig teeth together and she hasn't been able to eat, drink or squeal for almost 24 hrs. Pig abuse! Don't worry though, Lucy was fine after they caught her and wiped all the gunk away.

The rest of the week goes by without much drama UNTIL the kids realize Mother and Father will be home tomorrow!

First of all, they ate all the sugar, which Mother specifically told them NOT to do. Second Almanzo freaks out on Eliza Jane for being bossy and throws a blackening brush at her. That would be bad enough, but instead of hitting her it makes a huge splotch on the good wallpaper in the parlor!

Almanzo's a dead man. This is SERIOUS. We're talking punishment with the black snake whip serious, and all he can do is wait for Mother and Father to come home, notice the spot on the wallpaper and kill him.

But guess what? Bossy Eliza Jane scores some serious cool points when she spends all night cutting out a patch of leftover wallpaper she found in the attic to cover the blackening spot. Aw! Mother and Father never find out, unless they have series books in heaven, and I think we all learned a valuable lesson about...something.

Loving your sister? Not wasting taffy on pigs? Staying calm when you're cleaning the parlor?
Your choice.

Wait, There's a School in this Town?

2009-11-23T20:08:00.000-08:00

I just want to start by saying that I will never take the American school system of the 1980's and 90's for granted again. First of all, I went through adolescence under Clinton and the man strongly believed the children should know about birth control.
None of this 'abstinence only' nonsense in health class.

Second, none of my teachers were ever beaten to death by farm toughs, and none of the students were ever disciplined for tardiness with a 15 foot ox whip. But that could just be South Jersey.

Third, I actually got to go to school. Even during new moons in May, even though that's the very best time for planting pumpkins in the middle of the night.

Of course if you're Almanzo Wilder you wake up every morning in May and consult your lunar almanac, because, OH MY GOD will the new moon never come!? If I can believe everything I've learned about the importance of education, and I believe I can, Almanzo's hatred of school means the kid's not going to go far. I worry about him.

I guess I can, kind of, even though I love my sleep, understand the appeal of planting pumpkins in the pre dawn hours of spring. You're out in the corn fields alone, creating pumpkin life, there's fresh air...all that good hippy shit. But for Almanzo any old disgusting farm chore is better than school. The kid whines because he can't stay home from school to make soap. Since everything olde tyme is horrible you know I'm not talking about vegan shea butter soap made with fresh herbs. Making farm soap is a grisly operation. Better than school, but grisly.

"Mother measured the lye into a cauldron, and added pork rinds and all the waste pork fat and beef fat that she had been saving all winter...Almanzo could have kept the bonfires burning, he could have dipped the brown, slimy soap out the cauldron and filled the tubs with it. But he had to go back to school."

I understand that it's mixed with lye and there's a cauldron involved but it's hard for me to believe that rubbing waste pork fat on yourself would make you any cleaner. It's counter intuitive.

Stay in school kids!

Hey, That's Not so Bad

2009-11-18T21:39:00.000-08:00

Sheep sheering! I've decided that if I had to live on a farm 150 years ago, AND I had the kind of agency reserved for landed white men, I would have a sheep farm. Now for the Wilders sheep are just a small part of the menagerie, but I'm not selfish and I don't require townspeople to speak to me with fear and respect.

Just owning sheep is fun because they're funny looking and make comical noises, but shearing them is fun too. Actually the first step of shearing, which is bathing the sheep, is probably the only fun part but that's more than you can say for most 1860's, Upstate New York, prosperous farms jobs.

To make the sheep all clean and fluffy the first thing you want to do is call (not on the phone, it hasn't been invented yet) your French day laborers. No wait, better yet, your French day laborer's children. Father never misses a chance to instill the value of hard work into the next generation.

Don't worry though, sheep washing takes all the 'labor' out of 'child labor'. The kids chase the sheep all around the pasture and down to the river where the men catch them and rub them all over with soap. When the sheep are all soaped up and bleating, they push them into the river and make them swim themselves clean.

"When the other sheep saw this, every one of them cried, "Baa-aa-aa, baa-aa-aa!" and they all tried to run away...Washing sheep was was fun for everybody but the sheep. The men splashed and shouted and laughed in the water, and the boys ran and shouted in the pasture."

Sounds like fun right? Sheep farming, I'm telling you!

Don't think it escaped me that perhaps it just sounds like fun because every other thing that happens in 'Farmer Boy' has my fingers itching to get out the time travel phone and call olde tyme Child Protective Services. Plus, Almanzo's been trying to convince me that watching Mother haggle while bartering rags for tinwear is fun times. She's shrewd, no doubt, but it's no Wii boxing or Sunday brunch.

Spring!! Also Sucks!

2009-11-17T22:02:00.000-08:00

Yes spring has FINALLY sprung in upstate New York! Guess what that means? Did you guess 18hrs a day of child labor? Because if you did, you'd be right.

Reading 'Farmer Boy' is really exhausting. How can I work up the energy to sweep my floor when I learn that the 4 Wilder children have been getting up before dawn 3 days in a row to load the wagon with bushels of potatoes.
I mean they always wake up before dawn, but still.

Okay, so let's do the math. A bushel of potatoes is 54lbs according to the internet. A bushel of rye is 56lbs, and a bushel of carrots is 60lbs, but a bushel of bran is only 20lbs. It seems kinda arbitrary but I've come to learn that everything olde tyme sucks.

I'm seriously considering cutting farmer's markets out of my life, because they seem a little on the pioneery side. Though the one by my house has a bouncy castle, which is definitely not pioneery. Unless, unbeknownst to me, it's made of pigs' bladders, in which case I'm out for a number of reasons.

So...the Wilder children loaded 500 bushels of potatoes onto Father's wagon in 3 days meaning... 27 thousand EFFing pounds of potatoes. Divided by 4 Wilder-kinder, means Almanzo himself heaved 6,750lb of potatoes. Over a ton per day!
Does that, or does that not, make you want to leave the dishes till the morning?

No time to rest or stretch though, once the potato money is safe in the bank it's time for house cleaning. Not the kind of house cleaning you do, LAZY. I'm talking, pulling up the carpets, white washing the basement, sand scouring the butter tubs and a whole bunch of other stuff you wouldn't even understand.

But, now that the house is all clean, we can have some fun, right Almanzo?
"Outdoors the lilacs and the snowball bushes were in bloom. Violets and butter cups were blossoming in the green pastures, birds were building their nests, and it was time to work in the fields."

Sigh. I'm not going to describe the field work but rest assured it ain't fun, it's back breaking and I'm kind of trying to block it out of my memory. I do however want to give a shout out to Almanzo's sisters, Alice and Eliza, who have to farm in hoop skirts. That's right, 'Gone with the Wind' style hoop skirts and field harrowing, together at last.

Okay, now go take a nap and recover. We'll meet back here in the morning to discuss if Almanzo's ready to groom the 3 year old colts.

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

2009-11-16T12:18:00.000-08:00

The Wilders, like the Ingalls, aren't allowed to do much on Sundays besides eat and sit still. God's day and all. The Wilders do go to church but according to Almanzo church = sitting still and staring at '...the preacher's solemn face and wagging beard.' for 2 hrs. He makes no mention of what church is for besides another lesson in being quiet and an opportunity to show off being a rich farm kid (they rent the biggest horse shed in town).
It's a bit of a hobby of his.

Unfortunately this particular Sunday's bragging party has fallen victim to town cousin Frank's stupid-awesome store boughten hat. Almanzo, blind with accessory jealousy, tries to brag on his horses, but Frank's all, those are your father's, you don't even have a colt!

Oh! Ya burnt Almanzo! You haven't even fully broken your calves yet. I won't even bring up what happened when you tried to hitch them to your sled.

Bragging thwarted, Father's next grunt of approval possibly weeks away and the promise of a colt of one's own imposibly far in the future, Almanzo's seeks solace in the one place that always delivers. Mother's cooking.

Unlike the Ingalls who throw a dance every time there's enough maple syrup for the year, the Wilders eat rather decadently on the daily. In fact meals are described in such orgiastic detail that if Almanzo wasn't burning calories like a Victorian child laborer (which, I guess, he technically is) I'd fear a nascent eating disorder.

Check out Sunday dinner:

"Mother sliced the hot rye'n'injun bread on the bread board by her plate. Father's spoon cut deep into the chicken-pie; he scooped out big pieces of thick crust and turned up their fluffy yellow under-sides on the plate. He poured gravy over them; he dipped up big pieces of tender chicken, dark meat and white meat sliding from the bones. He added a mound of baked beans and topped it with a quivering slice of fat pork. At the edge of the plate he piled dark red beet pickles."

Almanzo ate all that and a slice of pumpkin pie and, even though he was full, a slice of apple pie with cheddar. Also the chicken-pie has 3 whole hens in it. Kind of mouth watering huh?

PS. Here is a recipe for rye'n'injun bread. It does not look very good, but it isn't as racist as it sounds. For early Americans, at least in this context, 'injun' only meant corn.
PPS. Yes, I'm aware that was a totally dorky PS.

Go Home and Hug Your Fridge

2009-11-12T14:35:00.000-08:00

Why is it always winter in Farmer Boy?

Well like I said before it's now cold enough to cut ice from the pond and Almanzo and Royal get the rest of the week off school for some back breaking labor. Wooo?

As you may or may not know, in the sad time before refrigerators everyone, back to prehistory, harvested ice and snow in the winter, packed it in straw or dirt or whatever and then unpacked it when it got hot to preserve their food.

The Persians stored ice in pits called yakhchals. Just in case you were interested.

The pertinant thing is that is has to be THE coldest part of the winter to harvest the ice. Keep this in mind when I tell you that our poor little Almanzo slips at the edge of the hole they've cut in the ice and falls in! "His hands couldn't catch hold of anything. He knew he would sink and be drown under the solid ice where nobody could find him. He'd drown, held down by the ice in the dark."

Of course the very fact that it's only page 70 and we know he marries Laura lets us know this didn't happen, but still. One of the French day laborers (paid in ham) manages to fish him out by the leg just in time. Whew!

The proper response to your son falling through 20 inches of ice into a swift current of nearly frozen water would be a hug. If you aren't the hugging kind of father, maybe you'd at least let your son go home. Change into some dry clothes, sit by the fire and eat some of those doughnuts he likes so much.
Confronting death can be hard for a small child.

However, if you are Mr. Wilder you would show your love by threatening a whipping but graciously not following through on it. Then you would drive your frozen and wet (9 year old!) son to the ice house to stack 50lb ice blocks for hours.

I'm sure the exercise warmed him right up.

Don't worry though, it's all WELL worth it because, "Buried in sawdust, the blocks of ice would not melt in the hottest summer weather. One at a time they would be dug out, and Mother would make ice-cream and lemonade and cold egg-nog."

Oh yeah, totally worth it for lemonade.

Go Almanzo, it's your Birthday

2009-11-10T20:27:00.000-08:00

Tell me your 1st reaction when you look at this page.

At first, of course, your mind is still awash with the excitement and schadenfreude of seeing the town bully getting thrashed like a shock of oats at harvest time. Booya, farm tough!

But then you're like, Birthday? Is that a picture of the gift young Almanzo is about to receive? Maybe I'm a perv, but I've been living in the Bay Area a long time and my 1st reaction was - 9 is a little early to be learning about S&M. Even for a farm. Not making a judgment about farm culture but I know kids learn about sex all early from the breeding and what not.

Let me know if I'm a perv or if you thought it for a minute too.

Anyway, yes, this is Almanzo's 9th birthday present, but no it is not some kind of double male chastity belt. It's...a CALF YOKE!!! Father made it for Almanzo, but the real gift is that Almanzo is now being trusted to break his own calves. This is a good thing, like the equivalent of getting your first cell phone now.

(Aside: I don't know if I'm making it clear enough, but Almanzo's life appears to totally suck, what with the sub zero temperatures, back breaking, endless chores and constant threats of violence. The only thing that keeps Almanzo going are the shreds of approval he gets from Father, and the promise of one day being able to drive the sleigh. Dream big.)

ALSO, because school couldn't be more of a joke in this town, Almanzo's alowed to stay home on his birthday so he doesn't have to wait till Saturday to start breaking the calves. Actually, it would probably be safer if everyone stayed home from school. Instead of school Almanzo has a fun filled day of breaking calves, sledding, eating (like 8) doughnuts, shaving shingles and pumping the well. It's 40 below again.

Luckily the fun doesn't have to end! Because tomorrow Almanzo and Royal are both skipping class to cut ice from the pond. See, when the weather is cold enough the blocks won't drip because all water exposed to air instantly freezes.
It's the kind of weather that makes you rethink the whole 'boys don't wear woolen veils' edict, huh Almanzo?

Whip it Good!

2009-11-09T21:15:00.000-08:00

Do you like foreshadowing?

Each of the first 3 chapters of Farmer Boy end with Almanzo taking a moment to remind us that the Hardscrabble Hill farm toughs (HHFTs) hold very dear to their hearts their plan to jump their teacher, Mr. Corse. And just in case you thought this was just some harmless roughhousing and good natured hazing, I wanna let you know that the HHFTs beat last year's teacher so thoroughly that, HE DIED!
187 on their MFing one room school house teacher. AND they're still allowed in school. AND none of the adults seem to care.

The main HHFT's dad is like, super duper proud that his son kills teachers. He straight up brags about it to other townspersons, like he raised the years most protien rich cow or something. Even Almanzo's Father is all, 'That's his business...When a man undertakes a job he has to stick to it till he finishes it.'
Or dies, whichever comes first. You know, whatevs.

So despite the mounting evidence that Mr. Corse should LEAVE THE COUNTY, he instead decides it's time to punish the HHFTs for their flagrant tardiness.

No, Mr. Corse, don't do it!
The threat of confrontation so completely freaks out the other students that the whole day prior is spent with heads on desks sobbing. Sobbing! The children think they're about to witness a murder. Another murder.

But when the HHFTs come in late from lunch again - BAM - it's a take down! 19th century teaching school style.

"Mr. Corse stepped away from his desk. His hand came from behind his desk lid and a long thin black streak hissed through the air.

It was a blacksnake ox whip fifteen feet long."

Wait, what?!
He then proceeds to whip the main HHFT, Bill, till, "...his trousers were cut through, his shirt was slashed, his arms were bleeding from the bite of the lash."

Okay, whipping students till they bleed and their clothes fall off in tatters is wrong, IF you want to be all didactic. However, I won't deny letting out a mini squeal of excitement, on public transportation no less, because that shit is seriously bad ass.

So Mr. Corse whips Bill right out the one room school house door all blubbering and begging and bleeding, and then does the same to the 2nd in command. The other two HHFTs, like the little scared babies they are, climb out the window and run away in the snow. Babies. Mr. Corse then coolly straightens his collar, wipes the sweat from his face with a kerchief, and starts in with the arithmetic lesson.

Nice.

The Pros and Cons of Being Almanzo Wilder

2009-11-09T19:51:00.000-08:00

Almonzo Wilder's life is predicated on a weird paradox, best characterized as 'Mo Money, Mo Problems.'

You see Almanzo's Father is, '...an important man. He had a good farm. He drove the best horses in that country. His word was as good as his bond, and every year he put money in the bank." Great right? Who wouldn't want their word to be their bond and townspeople to speak to them with respect, and dare I say, fear?

But maybe you wouldn't want so many cows and oxen and horses and hogs and calves and sheep that they didn't fit into your 3 barns. Because then you have to keep some baby cows in a shed, and it's 40 degrees below zero and they're all gonna die!!!
These Little House books are always threatening to kill the baby cows.

Don't worry though, there's a simple way to keep the calves alive. You just get up at midnight, with your whip (40 below zero) then you whip the calves until they run in a circle for an hour and get all heated. Then you can go back to sleep until 5am when you start your morning chores. See, simple.

The Ingalls just had one pig, and all they had to do was feed it all summer and eat it all winter.
Mo money, mo problems.

I Miss the Big Woods

2009-11-06T12:41:00.001-08:00

So, I was kind of bummed to see that the second Little House book had nothing to do with the Ingalls. I was really looking forward to Laura going through puberty.
Ew, does that sound gross? Sorry, but I was.

Farmer Boy is all about Laura's future husband, Almanzo Wilder. Almanzo? I'll give the name a pass because in real life he was kind of a babe. Good job Laura.

Anyway things on the upstate New York Wilder farm are a far cry from the idylic world of the big woods. The very 1st paragraph has Almanzo and his 3 siblings trudging to school in weather cold enough to freeze eyelids.
Boys, Almanzo, helpfully elucidates, don't wear woolen veils.

After the momentary excitement brought on by the re entrance of woolen veils, everything goes down hill. Almanzo goes to one of those olde tyme schools where all the kids sit in one room and get beaten when they can't spell correctly. In fact when Almanzo's older brother, Royal (way to play favorites Wilders) comes home with welts on his palms his father promises, "If the teacher has to thrash you again...I'll give you a thrashing you'll remember." Since spelling has always been a bit of a challenge for me, my palms were positively sweating when I read that.

Ha, ha! But actually good spelling, along with getting to wear your good butternut hull died coat, is actually the fun part of school. The teacher, Mr Corse is, in reality, an ineffectual (possibly gay) figure head. The school is really run by a bunch of 15 and 16yr old farm toughs who enjoy wholesome sports like busting up sleds, throwing smaller kids into the snow face first and forcing them to fight, '...though the little boys didn't want to fight and begged to be let off.'

What's that you say? They should fight someone thier own size? Well guess what, their life's ambition is to jump their teacher Mr. Corse. They're just waiting for him to try punish them for their flagrantly shitty behavior so they can pounce. The 1st chapter ends with Almanzo's ominous statement that, "Everybody knew the big boys would be tardy again. Mr. Corse could not punish them because they could thrash him, and that was what they meant to do."

Yikes!

Stay tuned, next I'll describe the hours of farm work Almanzo does when he gets home from school. The fun part is, he has to do it all in the dark because his father doesn't trust him with a lantern.

I wonder what the Ingalls are doing now?

Say Goodbye to the Little House in the Woods

2009-11-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

Don't cry... here take a tissue. Now take a deep breath.
There, better now?

Yes, this is the last post about Little House in the Big Woods, we'll be moving on to Farmer Boy next . Sounds kind of Skin-a-max but, okay.

So I don't know if I've been getting this across or not but if there's one thing I've learned from Little House it's that Ma is the world's most perfect Ma, and Pa is the world's most perfect Pa.
Intel on Ma is limited, and she doesn't get much dialogue but we do know she came from 'the East'. Mostly she just adroitly makes use of every part of Wisconsin. And you better believe she remains charmingly flushed and impeccably clean while she scrubs the corn or butters those cheese wheels.

Yeah, Laura gives her Ma her due, but it's pretty obvi it's Pa that she's obsessed with. She does such a good job describing him, I swear I'm half in love with him. Just kidding. Kind of.
I told you he has a beard right?

I totally mini swooned in the last chapter after Pa spent the night out by the salt lick but came back with no meat. At first Laura tricks you and makes you question Pa. No fresh meat Pa? Dude, we haven't had fresh meat since Spring so all the little baby animals had a chance to get grocery ready.

But AWWWWWWWW! Pa was up in a tree all night and couldn't shoot anything. The buck was too strong slash free slash wild slash majestic, the bear was too awesome to watch and the doe and the fawn well, their eyes were all big and moist and well, YOU KNOW.
Pa you big softy, you know we don't care when we get fresh meat again. As long as you kill that pig so we can play with his bladder and eat his tail.

After he tells this story, they all sit around the fire basking in each other's wholesome wonderfulness while Pa plays Auld Lang Syne on the fiddle. For some reason. Maybe it meant something different in 1870's Wisconsin.
(but not according to wikipedia)

Still Not Over the Dirt Curls

2009-11-03T19:49:00.000-08:00

Laura has got some serious self esteem issues around her brown hair. Like, she CANNOT stop talking about the fact that Mary's a blond.

I feel like that's the reason she's always getting in these little digs at Mary about being all prissy. She's always like, 'Mary had fun all day sitting still with her hands in her lap thinking about the best techniques for weaving straw hats and turning her head so her curls caught the light.'
And then she'll be like, 'I don't know why I can't be like that, instead I always end up climbing trees and having fun and being awesome. Poor me.'

And actually, during harvest time, Laura gets herself in to some BIG TIME trouble tangling in the case of Blonds V. Brunettes.

Admittedly Mary's an instigater, and goes a little too far around the woodpile while the sisters are gathering chips for kindling. By the way, gathering chips at the wood pile for kindling is the ONLY chore Laura will admit to not enjoying. So Laura's already in a pissy mood when Mary goes and insists that their Aunt Lotty prefers blonds to brunettes.
What?!

That barb earns Mary the stinging taste of Laura's palm.
But Laura earns herself a belt whipping from Pa, which kind of shocked me with it's swift Prairie justice. It's the darkest thing that's happened yet in Little House world. Well, it was kind of scary when Laura's cousin Charley stepped in a yellow jacket hive and had to be wrapped up in a mud and cloth cocoon. But that just ended up being a morality play about working hard and listening to your Pa.

Long story short I looked up a picture of the real Mary, and, while I would never malign a child's appearance, maybe Laura should calm down a little.

Cheese...It Does NOT Come From the Store

2009-11-02T17:35:00.000-08:00

I’m feeling not just entertained but educated by the Little House books. I’ve learned everything from how to smoke and salt my own ham to what will happen if I go sledding on the Sabbath.

Actually those aren’t that helpful for a vegetarian living in a non-religious and Mediterranean climate, but cheese, cheese I'm very familiar with. How do you make that cheese again Ma?

Sadly, Ma reminded me of a fact I learned and then immediately repressed while taking mushrooms on a tour of a cheese making farm outside Amsterdam. You just can’t make cheese without a heaping helping of baby cow stomach. (Don't worry the Ingalls didn't have to slaughter one of their own claves! Uncle Henry killed one of his and passed out the stomach lining like Halloween candy) Yes my quesadilla is as vegetarian as my 3,000 pairs of leather shoes. Do you know how much cognitive dissonance I’m going to have to apply just to be able to continue my hedonistic ways?

A lot. Thanks Ma. You’re lucky that as a modern American my cognitive dissonance muscles are strong, virile and constantly flexed.

Oh, and as an aside that has to do with absolutely nothing, Pa can collect honey without getting stung! He’s kind of amazing. He even shooed away a bear to get to the honey.

Two Houses Next to Each Other!!!

2009-10-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

As previously reported, Laura has never seen two houses next to each other.
She understands there's such a thing as 'A TOWN' since Pa goes there to sell his furs but you might as well be trying to explain the internet as what a store is.

However, spring is here in the big woods and it's time for Laura and her sister Mary to learn the lessons taught by the mean streets of Pepin, WI.

aside: Of course, I looked up Pepin, which is still a bustling metropolis of almost 1,000.
You may not be surprised to hear that they have annual 'Laura Ingalls Wilder Days' in September every year. Dang just missed it, see you there Sept 2010!

At first I assumed the trip to town would be just as successful and full of wholesome fun as Grandpa's sugar dance, but it laid bare a disturbing emerging theme.
SIBLING RIVALRY!
Dun, dun, DUNH!

That's right, Laura secretly thinks Mary's a snotty bitch who's just soooooooooooooo perfect, is better liked by everyone, everywhere and has prettier hair. Classic middle child syndrome. I bet baby Carrie ends up having prettier skin and being better at math than Laura.

I first noticed a faint breeze of resentment when Laura had to share her sturdy bark swing with Mary even though it was under Laura's tree. She was NOT happy about that, even though she tried to pretend that she loves to share.

Then the real problems started as they often do; over hair. You see, 'Mary's hair was beautifully golden, but Laura's was only a dirt-colored brown.' Well look Laura, don't buy into that whole blonds have more fun paradigm. Plus you both had to put big ol' bonnets over your fancy town hair anyway.

Things really heat up when they get to town and encounter the general store. At first Laura was so excited for the store that she could barely walk up the steps she was trembling so hard. But soon excitement turned to pissed-offedness, '"That's a pretty little girl you got there."' the shopkeeper said while admiring Mary's curls.
Nothing about Laura's dirt curls. God!

Then to add insult to injury, at the end of the wondrous store visit the storekeeper gave both girls a candy. But guess who got the better candy? Yeah, that's right, Mary.
The olde tyme poem written on the back of Mary's candy was like 3 times longer than the olde tyme poem written on the back of Laura's candy. Totally on purpose.

The worst part is that the candies are too precious to eat and must be kept forever wrapped in a kerchief, safe in a place of honor. A constant reminder of Laura's imagined inadequacy in the eyes of the townspeople.

Sadly that's not the end of the indignities Laura faces in town.
Pepin is on a lake and, of course, Laura's never seen a lake. The pebbles by the lake are as miraculous and life changing as every other thing in 5 year old, pioneer, Laura's life so she starts a pebble collection in her dress pocket to take home and swoon over.

Laura gets just a little bit too greedy with the life changing pebbles and before you know it she's gone and ripped right through the pocket of her good dress! Obviously she is inconsolable especially when she looks over at Mary.

'Nothing like this ever happened to Mary. Mary was a good little girl who always kept her dress clean and neat and minded her manners. Mary had lovely golden curls and her candy heart had a poem on it...Laura did not think it was fair.'

Laura! It sounds like Mary's life is even more boring than yours, BE GLAD!

For some reason Laura still characterizes her day in town as 'the most wonderful day in her whole life.'

Oh poor Laura.

A Moment for Beards

2009-10-29T11:02:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I totally love beards (on men) and rarely tire of talking about them.

Pretty much every man past puberty in the little house universe has a beard. They figure prominently in moments of endearment with children, alternately scratching and tickling a laughing, chubby face. They also serve as weather reports to house bound Laura during the winter; they're either clumped with snow, frozen into icicles or wet with rain. Very useful!

But the best thing about beards? They make everyone look like a nice person.
Name one person with a beard who looks mean. Santa? Hemingway? The chubby guy from this season's Top Chef?
No. No. and No.

Goatees are obviously a portent of the devil and therefore another story.

Finally!

2009-10-28T23:02:00.001-07:00

Something happens!

I think it's like when you join a cult and they don't let you sleep and all there is to eat is low protein gruel; it makes you open to suggestion and easily excited.
This is how the winter has been in the little house in the big woods.

All winter long Laura and her sister haven't even been able to leave the house. Just to take a ride in the sled they need all kinds of previously unknown outerwear, like stockings that go over your shoes and thick woolen veils to cover their faces.
Woolen veils?

On Sundays they aren't allowed to do anything at all but sit still and listen to bible stories. Laura can't even, '...knit on the tiny mittens she was making for baby Carrie.' And you know how wacko these kids go for mittens. Mittens were the sexting of the late 19th century.
They were of course allowed to look at their paper dolls, but they dare not dress them.

So you can imagine my excitement when I learned that Grandpa had gathered enough maple syrup to make sugar for the whole year!!!! And if you think I'm excited you can imagine Laura's excitement when she found out they were going to hold a dance to celebrate. Laura of course, has never heard of a dance. Laura has also never even seen 2 houses next to each other, so this is A BIG DEAL. I for one, am excited for her.

And oh, what a night! Ma put on a dress from her courtship days with Pa, and did her hair all up in one of those weird reconstruction era hairdos where the bangs got their own braids. The maple candy flowed like wine. There was no wine, but there were sour pickles. There was fiddling all night and even grandma did a jig.

Of course for me the most exciting part was imagining this scene - 'The big room filled with tall boots and swishing skirts, and ever so many babies were lying in rows on Grandma's bed.'

Makes it sound like a squirmy produce stall. This scene actually occasioned the only squabble of the night when Laura and her cousin Laura argued over which baby was the best. But all was well soon enough and before you know it they were waking up, eating their pancakes and maple syrup, throwing on their woolen veils and heading home.

Laura, Easily Amused

2009-10-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

Well friend, I'm a third of the way through 'Little House in the Big Woods' and living on the Prairie? Yeah, sounds pretty boring.
NOT trying to dis your childhood memories!

I totally know it's the kind of deprivation porn I would have really gotten off on as a 12 year old, but I'm finding it pretty hard to keep from turning it into a drinking game.

I'm thinking Laura's pretty young in this book like 5 or so, but she like DREAMS of having her very own corn cob wrapped in handkerchief to play with. (Don't worry, she gets one)

Here's a list of shit Laura squees over, let me know if I'm a bad American and a horrible cynic:

1. Having a house wolves can't get into. Actually, I agree, that's important.

2. When her dad butchers a pig because!
a. He takes out the bladder, wipes it off and blows it up so she can play with it. The worlds most disgusting balloon. Whee!
b. Laura and her sister get to share the pigs tail, which they enjoy eating. A lot. You can tell there'd be tears that pig tail eating comes but once a year, if they weren't kept busy with the head cheese and the lard rendering.

3. Frost

4. Butter molds

5. Listening to their Dad's stories. Please.

and

6. Staring at the kerosene lamp.
But! Keep in mind, it has pieces of red flannel in the bottom.

Plus, check out the non stop excitement of Christmas!

"In each stocking there was a pair of bright red mittens, and there was a long, flat stick of red-and-white-striped peppermint candy...They were all so happy they could hardly speak at first. They just looked with shining eyes at those lovely Christmas presents."

and

"Today the weather was so cold that they could not play outdoors, but there were the new mittens to admire, and the candy to lick. And they all sat on the floor together and looked at the pictures in the Bible..."

SQUARES!!! Seriously, that never could have been fun. I'm sure it was more like, "We got mittens and then went to the barn to play doctor with our cousins, make half hearted jokes about the cow's udders and cried in the hay about how bored we were."

More to come when I can get this squeaky clean taste out of my mouth and my eyes to stop rolling.

But First!

2009-10-25T21:52:00.000-07:00

One new thing I learned about while psyching myself up for Little House is that there is a SERIOUS, with periodic fictional violence, rivalry between fans of Laura from Little House and fans of Anne from Anne of Green Gables.
Like intense.
Red heads or bonnets? Pick your poison.

Now, I'm giving young Laura a chance but from what I've read so far she seems kind of simple minded and easily amused, which I'll cover in my next post.

I went ahead, got prematurely partisan, and voted in a poll for Anne. (you can too)
I know Laura was a real person and all who survived manifest destiny and winters, but I've already read 10 books about Anne. Plus she's an orphan and that should get extra points.