Much as we may sometimes curse the messengers who bring us dire forecasts, life without them meant that Laura's Pa took his life into his hands every time he ventured the couple of miles back to their claim land to load the hay he carted to their house in the tiny town of De Smet.
"Heap big snow come." That's the closest thing Laura's family gets to a forecast, from "a very old Indian." The more detailed forecast: "Heap big snow, big wind." There's nothing like reading the whole book, but here are 10 boons of modernity that "Long Winter" passages cast into gratitude-inducing relief: Suddenly, the Boston winter of 2015 feels more like a season of relative ease and mild inconvenience. There was nothing in the world but cold and dark and work and coarse brown bread and winds blowing." The trick is to compare our current winter woes not to our usual milder weather but to a dire prairie winter: the kind of winter when young Laura would wake, shivering, to a frigid house buffeted by blizzard, spend the dreary day twisting hay for heat and grinding wheat for the coarse brown bread that was her family's last remaining food, crawl back into a cold bed and shiver until the shivering itself made her warm enough to fall asleep. Friends of mine call it "The Brutal Series." (Wilder is back on the bestseller list, I see, with a never-before-published autobiography written in 1930.)īut "The Long Winter" offers, I would argue, the best of all antidotes to feelings that this is a horrible, awful, nasty winter. Of course, any reading of the vivid "Little House on the Prairie" accounts of laborious pioneer life will always work to induce a great surge of gratitude for our modern comforts. I pulled Laura Ingalls Wilder's "The Long Winter" from my son's bookshelf with the very explicit intention of helping myself feel better about this epic weather. (Minnesota Historical Society on Wikimedia Commons) A train stuck in snow in 1881, the ferocious winter Laura Ingalls Wilder described.
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