The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m enjoying all of the Little House books, but this one has been the best to date.
First, Laura’s a teenager here. She’s assumed many more grown-up responsibilities around the Ingalls’ home. Not only is her work becoming more critical to the operation of the household, she’s starting to be let in on the dangers of her family’s life in a way that she’s not been before. In The Long Winter, Laura faces the very real possibility of losing her family and her own life. She witnesses her parents shift their ideals, strange as they seem to modern audiences, to suit the needs of the family. Ma lets Laura help Pa with the summer haying despite her claim that only immigrants let their daughters do such work. Laura’s assistance not only helps Pa avoid sunstroke, but it contributes greatly to their survival in the long winter.
One thing I love about this book is that Ma finally loses it. She doesn’t go completely ape, but she snaps at Pa and just in general acts much more like I do on a daily basis (but without the profanity). I feel like I can relate to her better now, even though the hardships that cause her to lose it are relentless blizzards and the impending starvation of her family while I lose it when over something like my husband leaving the empty cat food cans in the sink rather than rinsing them out immediately and putting them in the recycling. Still, the proof that Ma ever loses it at all helps me feel a greater kinship to her.
I also really enjoyed the bits of discussion in this book about the double-edged sword of technological advance. Whether it’s Ma complaining about their reliance on kerosene or Pa concerned about their reliance on the trains, the point is that while technology brings us great gifts, we quickly become dependent upon their fruits and find we can’t live without them.
I find that I often use the Little House books as a model for how I ought to live my life. We experienced a four-day power outage in our New England home after the freak snowstorm last October, and listening to The Long Winter (I listened to the audiobook read by Cherry Jones), I constantly thought back to just how ill-suited our home (and our family) is to inclement weather. When we’re cut off from electricity, we can do nothing. Our food spoils, we can’t heat our home, we can’t cook, we have no hot water. Luckily we’re on city water and sewer and don’t rely on a sump to flush our toilets and run the taps, or we’d not have been able to stay in our home during that cold, dark four days. My thoughts turned to how to make our home less reliant on the “grid” and I realized (yet again) how little my husband and I know about the workings of our dwelling. While I wouldn’t want to live in a 250-square-foot home with my family, I can certainly see how doing so would (could) simplify our lives. I find myself yearning for knowledge about sustainable energy sources and uber-insulation and woodstoves, but in the end, daily life intercedes and I get tied up once again in the daily tasks of doing dishes and washing clothes. That and the knowledge that the longest we’ve lived in any home in our adult lives is two years is enough to discourage us from any major renovations, regardless of the purpose.
In the end, though, the thing that struck me was how close their family is. They have restraint and concern for the other family members and don’t just blurt things out whenever they think of them. They don’t yell at each other. They don’t clamor for the bigger share of possessions or food or parental affection. When they’re down (and they’re not down unless the wolf’s not just slavering at the door but has pulled up a chair for supper), they sing together or read together or just sit together and tell stories. Maybe learning how to make hay or how to grind wheat in a coffee grinder aren’t the lessons I should be getting from the Little House books.
But then, our coffee grinder is electric, too.
Imperfect Happiness 
so i have the whole set of little house books, i’ve had them since i was young, but i’ve NEVER read them (no matter how much i loved the show 🙂 i didn’t read this whole review, because now i’m thinking i’d like to start these with alani. . . we are more than halfway through alice in wonderland (first time i’ve ever read it), started little women last night (first time i’ll ever read it), and why not add some more classics 🙂
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My dad tried to make me read On the Banks of Plum Creek when I was a kid (I think I was 5 or 6). He would set me up with the book and instruct me to read a chapter and then he’d be back to talk with me about it. He may have been under the impression that I was a mini college student. I acted accordingly and just pretended to read the book and then guessed at the answers to his questions.
“How did Laura feel about the cows?”
“Umm…she didn’t like them?”
It was great preparation for my BA in English.
At any rate, I didn’t really read the books until my daughter started getting into them, which was during our road trip this summer. We’ve been reading them in conjunction with the audio books. Those audio books are fantastic. I’m glad our local library has them all. They’ve been great to listen to during our long drives around Massachusetts. I need to buy them, though, so we can put them on our mp3 player. We’ve been loving classics, though. E.B. White is a favorite, and Raold Dahl. We tried Peter Pan but it was too violent. Felix Salten’s original Bambi: A Life in the Woods was phenomenal. We both cried much of the way through it. And Anne of Green Gables. She and her dad are reading The Secret Garden right now, and then we’re going to try The Great Brain (set in Utah!). So many great books, so little time!
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