Guest post by Tatiana
The draw of Laura to me is the strong connection to nature and the flow of life – and as an aspiring writer, what a wonderful storyteller was Laura is. Here in part 5, from the very first words, we are placed in time and space and life’s cycle – “the wild geese were coming back from the southland.” Living in the city I have no natural marker for spring’s arrival; I rely on the calendar and accuweather.com. But here Laura’s sees and somehow knows that much will be coming with the return of the wild geese.
At first she doesn’t guess what is coming but then she writes…”a baby. So that was it!”. She is dizzy and her description so vivid, I felt her dizziness, I felt her “creeping around the house, doing what must be done…” I remember feeling tired and not quite right when I was pregnant too. I was with Laura as she tries to keep at her chores. And I felt her constant worry. But never worry about herself – only disappointment that the house is dingy and the trees not growing as they should. I felt her confinement at not being able to go out like she used to and when she was finally up and about, her joy at seeing the wild roses. And when she said, “It will be a girl and we will call her Rose,” I could see her with Manly and him nodding his head. I recalled how I too knew I would have a girl when I was pregnant and how I knew what I would name her. The tenderness in that one sentence showed how much Laura was ready for the baby, and how much she wanted to see hope all around her for the family’s future.
The rains were plentiful, the wheat and oats grew. I was swept away with Laura and Manly’s happiness – “He laughed and Laura laughed with him.” I admit though when Manly went for the binder, I began to worry. It was $200, which meant more debt. And I could see Laura was getting perhaps too excited – but so honest about it, so trusting. And all those exclamation points in her writing, “It couldn’t be! Yes that was right! Why, they would be rich! She’d say the poor did get their ice.” As she continues with her mental arithmetic and all they have to repay and even throws in that “she’d almost as soon have had a mortgage on Manly,” I began to really panic. Laura’s impatience and hurry to have the crop in is palpable. Is she turning a bit greedy or does she now realize how much she has to lose before the baby is born?
I would have loved to hear more about the DeVoes visit. As a plot device, they serve to show the scale of the storm damage when it comes, but it would have been nice to hear Laura talk with a friend and here a different side of her voice. The focus however stays on the severity of the hailstorm – a neighbor down hit by hail and all the wheat collapsed. Can it be right that all Manly said was “It’s got the wheat I guess” while Laura could not speak? Is he trying to keep his sanity with the statement, “And now let’s make some ice cream…You stir it up Laura and I’ll gather the hailstone’s to freeze it.”? I can’t quite figure out his reaction. Is he being strong for Laura so she won’t be so disappointed? Does Laura want to remember him that way? If it were me, I would have cried profusely or perhaps had some choice words about the weather. Something about the responses seems too constrained. Or is part of being the pioneer, the readiness for great loss as well as great gain? They do acknowledge and tally the losses and…“Though plans were wrecked, the pieces must be gathered up and put together again in some shape.”
Both Laura and Manly had endured hardship before. But nature and life continues no matter what. Winter is coming and a baby too. The one thing that bothered me in the accounting was that Laura did not know about the five hundred dollars debt on the house. It didn’t seem right that Manly would not tell her something as big as that. It also didn’t seem like Laura to be put off by all the numbers. Or maybe that is just my perception of Laura. For such a strong person, numbers should not be a problem. Especially as she was intimately involved in all they had to be done to salvage the first year and start again. And start again they would on the homestead claim shanty.
Comments11
I too would have liked to have seen more of Cora and Walter. And it’s puzzling that we never met them before. Surely Cora would have gone to school with Laura at some point … unless they just moved to the area this year?
Why didn’t Ma or Carrie come out to help with the housework when she was so ill in early pregnancy? (Or, as we’ve discussed, Mary Power or Ida or even Cora.)
I think the calm reaction to the storm is similar to what we’ve seen before in her books — the idea that there’s no point in complaining about bad things, because complaining won’t change anything. You just accept it and try to get on with things.
The comment about the mortgage really struck me on this reading. It just goes so much against what we’ve been told about their relationship. The marriage is one of equals — Laura wouldn’t promise to obey him and he was fine with that. They were ‘thoroughly in sympathy.’ While Manly suggested that she spend her teaching money on the colt, it was a purchase that they decided together.
And then we’re suddenly told that he didn’t think it was worth bothering her about a huge debt. Essentially ‘don’t worry your pretty little head about it — money is a man’s business.’ Maybe if she had known she would have had something to say about all the other debts — or she could have found some way to help with the expenses. (As a married woman she couldn’t teach school any more,but she could probably sew.)
And I wonder how the debt on the house worked. Wouldn’t he have been expected to make a payment at some point? How long could he carry the debt?
Regarding the morgage money, I think this is where we see the inconsistencies between the Manly of this novel and the Almanzo of the Little House books. Consider the Almanzo of The Long Winter who hid his wheat, it doesn’t really coincide with this money borrowing, risk taking Manly, does it?
I would argue that Almanzo is pretty risk taking in The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years. The long cold rides to find wheat or bring Laura home from the Brewster’s are in some ways riskier than debt. Going into debt was then, and is now, a big part of farming. If he wanted to have a large wheat farm going into debt was the only option. Pa didn’t go into debt, but Pa was only a step ahead of starvation most of his adult life.
The colt purchase – wasn’t that expected to make a profit for them?
I don’t think getting help from family and friends during pregnancy was done then. I imagine it was considered a woman’s lot in life and you were expected to manage.
I’ll agree that under normal circumstances a woman would be ‘expected to manage’ during pregnancy. But Laura seems to have had an unsually rough time, and family/friends DID traditionallyhelp out during illnesses.
Being unable to leave your bed without fainting definitely qualifies, IMO.
Yes, I agree–remember, she wrote that one of the things the “hundred precious dollars” had gone for was “help”? And, Ma wasn’t just sitting on her backside watching soaps. She STILL had all her own chores to do and a larger family to do them for.
Maybe they did and she didn’t write about it, along the lines of leaving out the family that lived with them during TLW? I just have a hard time picturing Ma coming to take care of her, or sending Carrie, she always seems like a “keep a stiff upper lip” kind of person. But I’m only speculating.
I think some of it may have been how Laura viewed the help. My mother painted a shed, washed a car, and put together a stroller in the two days before I was born. The day she came home from the hospital she found out her mother and sister had “mopped” our kitchen floor rather than “scrubbing” it. So the first thing she did the next day was to scrub the floor so that it would look “decent” when people came to see the new baby. Could people have offered, but Laura expected herself to complete the tasks?
As for Laura’s impatience with the wheat, I think she sees what a great crop it is, but knows that it can disappear in an afternoon by grasshoppers, blackbirds, tornado, hail or prairie fire (is there a calamity I missed that has happened to the Ingalls?) so that she wants to get it harvested before that happens. I’d call it paranoid, but considering there was a hailstorm, it would seem to be true.
… And let her neighbor be a lesson: Don’t go outside in a hailstorm while the hail is still falling! Wait until it’s done. THEN you can gather it up, measure it, make ice cream out of it, save it in your freezer, and of course, report its size to the National Weather Service :).
Wonder why Laura did nt teach school again ?
Stephen, it wasn’t considered “proper” for a married woman to teach school in those days, for a few reasons; but the one I read that stuck out in my mind (can’t remember where) was that married women, having been introduced to *ahem* marital pleasures would unintentionally corrupt young minds. Of course, life for a homestead wife was soooo very busy, she wouldn’t have had time to teach. Her primary job was keeping that home running — a monumental, herculean effort back then.
I wonder if the relative wealth of Almanzo’s childhood was part of the reason he acquired so much debt. Things you grow up with can seem essential or as though you wouldn’t live a civilized life if you didn’t have them. While Laura was accustomed to doing without many material goods and store-bought items and to living in claim shanties and one room houses, Almanzo grew up on a prosperous farm with a big house with a nice parlor and many more barns, animals and fields than the Ingalls ever had. Almanzo’s mother made more selling her butter than Pa made in a whole year. The new buggy in THGY, the wedding house with the carpenter built panty, the horses and saddles are extravagances likely Laura would have been content without. But Almanzo may have felt somewhat entitled to live at this high standard or at the very least accustomed to the point of thinking it is just what you do. He also seems to have wanted his new bride to have these nice things and likely enjoyed being the big shot who gave them to her (which might explain not telling her about the debt on the house). It was clearly hard to eek out a living on the South Dakota prairie and sadly a miscalculation that the crops the homestead produced would be able to pay for all the these purchases.
I don’t think it is surprising that Laura would have not have questioned Almanzo on his decisions to spend at the very beginning of their marriage–he was a man, he was older and he had been homesteading for several years. And their relationship was still new and she may have felt uncomfortable even broaching the subject. He seems to have managed money up to the point of their marriage without problems so she has no reason to question is judgement initially. From what I gather of their years together, it does seem that after discovering how badly the management of their finances in the beginning of their marriage turned out, she never neglected them again.
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