The Annual Reading of The Long Winter

I just finished my annual reading of The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I think it’s probably my favorite book. Not just in the Little House series– but of all the books I’ve ever read. It’s the one I’ve re-read the most often.

Not to spoil it if you haven’t read it– it’s not a very cheerful story. Laura and her Ma and Pa and sisters (blind, good Mary; thin, fragile Carrie; and small Grace) endure a long, hard winter of seven months of blizzards. Their little town of DeSmet in the Dakota territory is only a year old and the townspeople run out of supplies when the trains stop running due to the weather. Laura’s family goes from eating simple but hearty meals of beans and salt pork and bread to eating just potatoes and bread to eating a coarse bread made from Almanzo Wilder’s seed wheat ground in the coffee mill. They run out of things to burn and end up making sticks out of twisted hunks of hay to keep from freezing. It gets bad. They are starving and cold. They’re cut off from the rest of the town– each family unable to make much contact with the others so that they might as well not be in town at all– the blizzards are that bad.

It’s the darkest of the books (until Laura gets married and they have a series of misfortunes). Laura describes the monotony of surviving the winter as an unending cycle of grinding wheat, twisting hay, eating the coarse bread (without butter or preserves or gravy– just coarse, brown bread), sleeping– all in a semi-darkness brought on by the blizzards and lack of kerosene.

At the lowest point Pa can’t play the fiddle– his hands are too chapped from the cold. They exhaust the only other entertainment– reciting from memory the things they can remember like poems from their schoolbooks or verses from Sunday School. Laura feels “dull” and “tired.”

And then– in the last few chapters it all comes out well. Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland make a desperate run for some rumored wheat, find it, bring it back, and save the town from starving. The Christmas barrel that was sent out from the Minnesota church on the last train arrives with the turkey still frozen and they Ingalls have a Christmas feast in May to celebrate the return of Spring and their survival.

Mixed in are a few observations about human nature. The storekeeper that tries to make an unfair profit from the wheat brought in to save the town. The inexperienced Easterner that ruins a (literal) shot at some meat when the men see a rare herd of antelope. The patient Ma who snaps.

I’m not sure why I love it so. But I do. And I’ve reread it every year since I first read it when I was about 9. I usually read it in the summer. Her descriptions of the howling winds and thick snows of the blizzards chase off the humid Michigan summer heat. This year I read it late. I had it with me at church this week. We had a conference after church and I used the half-hour between to read a bit. I was interrupted by several people asking what I was reading. Our pastor’s eyes lit up when I showed him the cover. He knows it well, too.

Several years ago I was doing a research project for work. I spent a day at the Detroit Public Library’s special collections pulling images for an exhibit. The staff there was pretty patient– they filled my many requests with trips to the archives. I finished earlier than I’d expected to and I sought out the librarian that had been the nicest and asked politely if it was true that the original manuscript for The Long Winter was in their collection. She sighed and laid aside her work and led me to a locked case where she handed me a pair of white cotton gloves. We sat together at a long table where she carefully pulled a Red Chief notebook from an archival box and opened it to reveal Laura’s long-hand writing. Page after page in long hand was the story I’ve loved complete with corrections and crossed out phrases. I soaked it in. Took in the way she shaped her letters and the height of her letters. And then I thanked the librarian for letting me see it. She was startled. Didn’t I want to see the rest? She was willing to sit and turn it page by page while I read it. The entire thing. I was just as startled. “Oh no. I’ve read it before. I just wanted to see it in her handwriting.” I don’t remember a single image we pulled that day for the project at work– and I was there pulling images for at least 6 hours. But I remember the way my throat filled up with my 9 year old heart when I saw that first page of Laura’s familiar words.

If you haven’t read the Little House books you shouldn’t necessarily start with The Long Winter but keep reading till you get to it. Little House in the Big Woods will seem simple and childlike. Little House on the Prairie might be too earnest. Farmer Boy (my second favorite) will make you obsess over donuts and ham and baked beans. By the Banks of Plum Creek is where the payoff starts in your investment with the Ingalls Family. By the Shores of Silver Lake is the hardest one for me to slog through. Partially because in the first 50 pages or so Jack the dog will die and Mary will be blind. And then there are all the passages about building the railroad (Robby loved this book because of that). My beloved The Long Winter makes its appearance here. And then it’s a happy coasting through Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years before Laura’s writing tone changes with her memories of The First Four Years of her marriage to Almanzo Wilder.

Let me know what you think.

Does reading books to a 5-year-old count?

My pal Gail posted a NY Times piece about Nina Sankovitch reading one book-a-day for a year. Think about that– 365 books in 365 days.

I can’t always get in the local newspaper– now down to a pathetically few, few pages. The articles explains that the Nina is a wife, a mother, and a former environmental lawyer (I’m not sure if that really matters but neither does the fact that she has “piercing blue eyes”). She reads at night when her children are in bed and in the wait to pick up her kids– even at the US Open. (I take all that to mean that Nina carrys a book everywhere. I imagine that she, like me, chooses her purses based on whether or not they will carry a book easily.)

Her “close calls” came in the form of not starting the Christmas day book until 10 p.m.

So what does Nina have that I don’t? I don’t supposed it’s the household help that comes once a week… or the fact that she’s cut out certain activities from her daily routine: gardening, reading magazines, “wasting time” on-line, “ambitious cooking,”  “coffee with friends”…

She reads her books and blogs about them the next day posting a review. That’s more ambitious than I’m willing to be right now. I like ambitious cooking. I don’t do coffee with friends– but I do the occasional weekend with them. I like reading my magazines.

Nina’s also a fan of the television show NCIS. She mentions it as a non-reading pleasure. NCIS? Of all the things on television you’re going to watch NCIS? That’s like going to a Chinese restaurant and ordering the chicken fingers.

I’m jealous of you, Nina– for all the books you’re reading… but I’ll stick with my Jack-induced slower state of reading (See “READS“). And I’ll blame it on not having household help one-day-a-week.

From the mighty OK

Robby was tending the crops of his facebook farm. It’s a silly little diversion… we both have little farms. Jack loves them. He likes to help us “plant” crops and “harvest” them, etc.

So tonight Robby was getting some help from Farmer Jack. One of the on-screen prompts gave an option of  “OK” which our Nearly Reading Jack read as “Oak.”

A few years ago I remarked occasionally on the little explosions in his vocabulary– how, suddenly, he would add dozens of words or phrases to his repetoire. Now it’s sight words. He’s delighted in “Exit” signs and ramps. He takes glee in the word “Jackson” because it has his name in it, too. He studies road signs: “stop” and “Do Not Enter” and “No Turn on Red”…

And, like his earlier additions to his spoken vocabulary, I sit with my breath caught near the lump in my throat that is my heart– awed and excited.

Tonight, at church, my 12-year-old friend Anthony was thisclose to finishing Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and I delighted that my Jack might also tote a book around some day eager to tell others what his story is about.

I’m moving to England. And back two hundred years.

I’m watching Sense & Sensibility (BBC) again. It’s probably about the 14th time I’ve seen it. It’s exquisite.

Elinor has great clothes in it– nice and plain and dark colored gowns. Sensible. The little cottage in Devonshire is perfect– as was the grand Norwood in Sussex. Edward is swoon inducing. And this little Margaret is enchanting. Not annoying or cloying like some other versions. I like the world they live in. I like measured Elinor. And her gorgeous coats. I like their tea cups and gentle manners and the green, green countryside.

It’s been a rainy, gray, and gloomy day. This is the perfect background accompaniment to the rain and to the work I’m rushing to get done.

Yes, yes, we’ve all read the books.

Overheard at Jack’s swim lesson: two mothers (mid 40s?) discussing the latest Harry Potter flick with fervor. They went on and on and on complaining about the time spent explaining horcruxes. How all that was wasted. It was for people “who don’t know what’s going on”…

And me without my iPod.

Shhhh.

We’ve been using the library this summer. It’s a tiny gesture on my part to help out with the budget.

I like using the library– I like the wealth of out-of-print books and fun finds… but it’s frustrating to read something really, really good and then have to return it. I want it on my shelf so I can wander across it at 3 a.m. on a night with  insomnia… or grab it to take to the Lake for a reread.

And I get depressed thinking about all the crappy books that the library is housing mixed in with the ones I love.

Jack likes going to the library, too– but for an entirely different reason. He likes the children’s room and the “Green Eggs and Ham” computer game… And the stacks of puzzles and games. He’s worse than I am about returning books– today we brought back three and came home with two of them and one new one, “I want to keep these longer,” he pleaded.

This summer I’ve been reading goofy books from the section on writers who write about themselves. William C. Anderson and Ludwig Bemelmans. Today I picked up a weird assortment including a books about a nun, an undertaker, an Alaskan army wife, and an old “Anne” book (L. M. Montgomery) because my own copy is AWOL.

The guy in front of me checked out three books about serial killers and murders. I’ll stick with my bagful.

Insomnia

Can’t sleep tonight.

I’ve done all the stuff to welcome sleep– drank some milk, took a bath, read some, facebooked some… but it’s no use. I’m wide awake.

So here are some random thoughts:

1. Read any good books lately? I just finished Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book. It’s good. Not as good as her Year of Wonders but good. I wonder why her stuff isn’t optioned for movies.

2. I’m down to my last box of Mallomars. And I’m getting nervous about it. My Mother-in-Law gave me two cases of them for Christmas. There’s nothing like a good Mallomar and orange juice.  A little chocolate, a little marshmallow, a little juice– ah, bliss. My bliss, unfortunately is about to run out.  Stupid midwest.

3. I’m wanderlusty lately. I want to pack us all up and go someplace for a few days or weeks. Live out of a well-packed suitcase and eat new things, see new places, return home sated.

4. On Sunday night, also unable to sleep (stupid time change?) I found Mark & Olly on television. Two british men who go off on tangent adventures because they can. The series has them living with an Amazon tribe in some far part of Peru. I watched two and a half episodes that night– this is how I fell into the trap of loving Deadliest Catch, too– but it’s interesting TV.

5. Jack’s vocabulary has exploded again. This time it’s all the funny little in-between words… adjectives and adverbs and the ilk. He used the word “also” today. It broke me up. He’s delighted in our recognition of his new words. And he’s a great mimic. He’ll try out phrases he hears from us or his movies. This week we’ve watched A Charlie Brown Christmas a few times so there is a lot of Linus, Charlie, and Snoopy coming out.

6. I can’t beat Robby in Scrabble. Or Lexulous rather. We play it on Facebook. It’s disconcerting to lose to him when it is a matter of words and not numbers… but he’s a much better strategist than I am. My problem is I get so delighted in discovering a word I forget to pay attention to what might be more advantageous. Sometimes the two letter words get more points than the 7 letter words. It’s frustrating, too, because Lexulous circumvents the rules of Scrabble. I grew up on the rules of Scrabble– my grandmother was unyielding when it came to those rules. And there was no use of the Official Scrabble Dictionary unless there was a challenge thrown– you had to rely on the words you knew and could defend– not thumbing through the dictionary to find a word that incorporated the tiles in front of you. You can cheat quite a bit in Lexulous against those rules– it takes a lot of the fun out of it.
And it makes me a crabby opponent. The other day Robby started a new game (which irritated me– the loser gets to do that, not the reigning champ) and played a word that I didn’t know.
“Oooh! A new word! What’s it mean?” asked me earnestly.
“I don’t know,” came my husband’s hesitant reply.
“Yeah, then we’re done with this game then, aren’t we?”

7. To do: Learn the Kitchener Stitch so I can finish up two pairs of socks. Sew Jack’s teddy a little cape so that he can be “Super Georgia.” Drag Robby to IKEA to look at ideas for the kitchen and dining room (we’ll pay the Swedes in lingonberries). Paint a family tree on the upstairs hallway wall for Jack. Clean the basement. Get Robby to do his Charo impression again.

8. I need to come up with a fun treat for Friday at Jack’s preschool. I like bringing in the treat. It’s fun to try to find something that all 20 kids will eat.

Okay.  This hasn’t helped. I’m still not sleepy.

And now I want a Mallomar.

The Miracles of Ed and Adrian

Jack is still not “completely trained” which is a nice Mommy Euphenism… what I mean to type is that Jack is “still soiling himself.” (Were I the Daddy, and not the Mommy, I’d type Jack is still “crapping his pants.”)

We haven’t pushed it (no pun intended). Our theory is that, in his own time, he’d decide that the little Mickey Mouse undies would be far more appealing than Size 4 Huggies. (Particularly because I made a solemn vow when Jack was tiny that I wouldn’t ever buy the Size 5 Huggies. They seemed akin to adult size diapers and it creeped me out… Consequently, the little man has been somewhat squeezed into his Size 4s each night.) Of all the battles we’ve endured and have in front of us– this one, this basic function of polite society, seemed the least worth fighting.

Everyone’s weighed in. Some of our friends and family are horrified that he’s yet “untrained.” We see it in their eyes even as we shrug it off. “He’s not going to college in a diaper. Eventually he’ll decide he’s ready,” became our mantra in these scenerios. (We used to say “kindergarten” but somewhere we gave ourselves a wider berth.)

And we’ve had plenty of useless advice:
“Give him m&ms!” (He won’t eat chocolate.)
“Take away a toy” (He shrugs and says goodbye to it and finds something else to do.)
“Don’t change his pants.” (He walked around one afternoon with an increasingly bloated Huggies until his little legs chaffed. And never complained.)
“Make him sit on the potty.” (This was our favorite. He sat there one day for nearly the whole day. Completely happy. Watched a movie on the portable DVD player, flipped through his train catalogs, ate lunch, and sang every song he knew… )

Jack is unbribable. As exasperating as that can be sometimes (bribable kids are easier. Think about it.) we can’t help but think that might hold him in good stead down the road. He’s not going to cave easily to pressure– whether it’s our’s or the idiot buddy that says, “Hey! let’s go joy riding in that car over there!”

And then came Adrian and Ed.

Adrian arrived first– he’s the newborn son of our best pals. Suddenly Jack was no longer the baby in our midst but a “great, big boy!” in light of tiny, mewing Adrian. Jack was somewhat disappointed that this long awaited little friend was somewhat incapacitated– Adrian’s not able to run and play and eat pizza like Jack can… but there was a glint in Jack’s eye of the realization of his own cababilities.

So, in the blink of an eye, Jack was casually mentioning to us, “I have to go to the bathroom” and then going off to urinate, flush, and wipe his hands. 

Robby and I held our breath.

Ed came along this week. Inadvertently. Jack and I were home one afternoon this week and both of us were a little cross. I’d just changed his pants again. After he’d promised, “I’ll tell you when I have to go potty, Mommy. I promise.” I went back to reading a book and Jack went back to playing with his toys. We have steam radiators in the house and they tend to pop and hiss and clink. Jack can go weeks without noticing the sounds then have a day where he needs to be reassured that “it’s just the furnace, sweetie. It’s okay.” But this day I was distracted. I was in the middle of reading The Reader by Bernard Schlink and so when Jack paused in his play to ask, “Mommy! What’s that?! Mommy!” I didn’t look up from my book and said, “That’s the monster that bites small boys in the popo when they poopoo in their pants.” (Yes, I know, Tolstoy only wishes he’d written that sentence.)
Jack: “What? A monster? It’s not the furnace?”
Worst Mommy Ever: “His name is Ed.”

Jack’s little face went white and his lip started to tremble. I closed my book. He burst into tears, “I don’t want Ed to bite my popo Mommy!” I started to laugh. Because, really, Ed is quite possibly the poorest name for a monster… and it was all rather ridiculous. “Jack– it’s okay. I was kidding. There’s no Ed. There’s no monster. Mommy was being silly. It’s just the furnace baby.”

But he didn’t believe me.

So now, suddenly, we have a kid that runs to the bathroom when he needs to poo. That Ed is pretty effective.

Yesterday I had to go to a funeral so Jack was going over to play at the grandparents. “Let’s go potty before we go, okay?”
Clever Jack: “I’ll go potty at Grandlady’s house”
Clever-er Mommy: “Ed knows where they live.”
Jack ran. RAN. to the bathroom where he promptly shat. Three times in the space of a half hour.

I’m torn. I should put a stop to this. Somehow prove that there is no Ed.

Ed is growing. At our pals’ last night Ed took on a shape and size. Apparently Ed has been spotted before– and the glimpses show that his head is all teeth. No lips. So he drools and makes a horrid sucking sound when he uses a straw. Robby and Chris exchanged Ed stories while Jack played nearby and I shushed them, guilty that I’d started it all.

Yet, really, teeth and all, Ed isn’t so bad. I’m not sure which I feel worse about– giving a name to Jack’s worst fears or taking this long to give a name to Jack’s worst fears…

Because, and still holding our breaths, we may be on our way to those Mickey Mouse undies yet.

Columbus didn’t actually discover anything that wasn’t already there

When Jack discovered his hands– that they were attached to him and he could make them move at will– was one of those Big Moments. Sure, it was wrapped in the ridiculously cute packaging of his mouth in a little “O!” shape while his eyes lit up with the wonder of these strange things at the end of his arms. We were charmed at his utter delight. We were crew members on an Apollo mission. New frontiers and all that.

I’ve been feeling that way myself a little lately.

My high school reunion a few weeks back was pleasant enough– there were some old pals that made it worth the $45 dollar bad appetizers. The real payoff of the night was when a couple of those old pals encouraged me to get on Facebook. (Encouraged is nicer than saying that they openly mocked my admission that “I used to have a MySpace page…” “Uh, Terri– it’s not 2005 anymore. Catch up with the rest of us.”)

Later that week I signed myself up. And now I’m in contact with a handful of people that I grew up with and then lost track of. Which is where I’m feeling a little akin to that moment when Jack was so startled by his own hands…

I’m still me. My trappings are different– I’m somewhat of a grown up with a mortgage and a job. I have Robby and the JackRabbit and the little black dog and the demanding Dorothy (for a goldfish she’s got a lot of attitude)– but underneath the new layers is still me.

I find that somewhat astonishing.

Take my pal David. I haven’t seen him for years and years– twenty probably– but in the last few weeks, plucked out of cyberspace– there he is. Still recognizably the boy I knew. He commented on the Koala entry– about his experience with the Ian McEwan’s book Atonement. And I gasped out loud because I’d felt the same way about it. The last third of that book is a bullet train. No way was I jumping off until I’d got to the end… And when I finished I sat somewhat stunned. Dazed a little at how dizzying the effect of a really good story is. I’ve told at least a dozen people they should read Atonement and there is crickets. Yet it came as no surprise that David would have loved it, too– despite the fact that I haven’t a clue as to what he’s read in the last two decades.

My pal Dehan and I like some of the same music. We did twenty years ago, too. My pal Gail and I used to write letters to each other. I have a suitcase stuffed with them. We’ve fallen out of that habit somewhere since Jack’s arrival… yet she can send me a text message with less than 10 words that has almost the same effect that one of her neatly lettered envelopes in my mailbox.

It’s jumbled– I can’t really explain it other than to say if nothing else I’ve had the good fortune to know some very good people. People that I still recognize and still recognize me. Our cores are still the same. Jack’s hands were there all along. He just had to figure out that. The only difference is about 38 years.

Shhhhh. She’s sleeping.

This weekend we went up to the Lake to see the in-laws. The cottage is an enchanted place– there, somehow, there is time to read and knit and sleep. Little elves make meals and do the laundry. Okay. Maybe it’s my mother-in-law that does those things.

But the end result is that I spent a large chunk of Saturday in bed. Sleeping. Reading (James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips if you are interested). Sleeping some more. Fired up the laptop (Robby’s– mine is still driverless. What IS a driver?) and did some work. Four Hello! magazines (I like to pretend I’m in Britain when I read them.)

Robby and Jack played in the Lake. Friends came for a whitefish and sweet corn dinner. The sun took it’s sweet time slipping down past the other side of the Lake.

And did I mention that today, on my father-in-law’s satellite television there was an all day Beverly Hills 90210 marathon???