Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
That’s the title of a chapter in The Long Winter, about yet another blizzard that comes to the prairie in April (after the blizzards started in October).
There’s four inches of snow on the ground as I write this and another foot predicted by tomorrow night, and wow do I feel Laura’s despair over seven months of winter:
There were no more lessons. There was nothing in the world but cold and dark and work and coarse brown bread and winds blowing…The winter had lasted so long. It would never end.
If you’ve never read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, I think it would make good quarantine reading. They run out of fuel, they nearly run out of food (Almanzo saves them!), they can’t leave the house, there’s nothing to do, and near the end of the book everyone is so broken down they’re ready to give up.
But then! Good old Pa jumps up and shakes his fist at the blizzard howling outside the tar paper shack:
“It can’t beat us!” Pa said.
“Can’t it, Pa?” Laura asked stupidly.
“No,” said Pa. “It’s got to quit sometime and we don’t. It can’t lick us. We won’t give up.”
Then Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.
It’s got to quit sometime and we don’t. That’s right, friends.
I’ve been tweaking my neck and shoulder muscles at the gym doing exercises I’ve done before, at the same weight, with no issues. I finally figured out it’s because I’m sleeping at a weird angle and that throws things out of alignment. Time for a new pillow!
I’m a side sleeper and the struggle is real–I’d been using the Wamsutta pillow recommended by The Strategist but it flattens out after a few months. So I got the Xtreme Comforts Shredded Memory Foam (!) recommended by The Wirecutter and used it for the first time last night and let me tell you: It is AMAZING.
I woke up with this quote in my head from Little House on the Prairie (the Fever ‘N Ague* chapter):
Ma leaned back in the softness. Her thin cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkled with tears but her smile was beautiful. …She said, “Oh, Charles! I haven’t been so comfortable in I don’t know when.”
*Thirty years of reading these books and I still have no idea how to pronounce “ague”.
I finished the first sock for Doc’s dad and it’s a little…rustic. It will smooth out more after I wash it but the thicker yarn and the BRIGHT RED are just screaming Christmas presents from Little House In The Big Woods:
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, all beautifully notched along one side.
They were all so happy they could hardly speak at first.
Maybe I should wrap the socks with a stick of peppermint?
Time to make handmade Christmas gifts, that is. Everyone’s getting a Laura Ingalls Wilder Christmas this year:
In the morning they all woke up almost at the same moment. They looked at their stockings, and something was in there. Santa Claus had been there. Alice and Ella and Laura in their red flannel nightgowns and Peter in his red flannel nightshirt, all ran shouting to see what he had brought. 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, all beautifully notched along one side.
They were all so happy they could hardly speak at first.
In other words, everyone’s getting the modern equivalent of mittens and peppermint.
(Read the whole chapter from Little House In The Big Woods here.)