One of the reasons I moved to New York was for the snow. I grew up in places where it didn’t snow much and it was always impressive to see pictures of the crazy deep snow that was happening back East, in New York. Often the pictures were of Buffalo, I realize now, which is not New York City. but they were labeled “New York” and so I expected, when I moved here, snow. And, for a while, I got it. (Now we get rain instead.)

One year, many years ago, we got 17 snow storms in a single winter. The snow itself wasn’t bad; most of the storms left only a few inches. But people would walk across those inches, melting them into slush, which would then freeze, hard, overnight. And then it would snow again so that you couldn’t see the ice. Between my subway stop and my office was a long block of empty buildings. Sidewalks in front of empty buildings didn’t get shoveled. My office, that year, was full of people with sprained wrists and ankles, wrenched backs, and banged heads.

At the end of March, the CEO declared winter was over and held a big party. He catered in Mexican food, opened his wine cellar, and hired a mariachi band.

The next day – a Saturday – it snowed again.

On Monday, the mariachis returned and roamed from office to office, serenading us as we worked. And then spring arrived.

The Long Winter is my favorite of the Little House series. As a child, I usually read it during the summer, when it was too hot to go outside, with the A/C cranked up high, wrapped in a blanket. I still read it at least once a year. During Covid, I read it two or even three times a year.

I read it when I’m feeling discouraged because it inspires me to keep going.

The book tells the story of the Ingalls’ second winter on the wide, Dakota prairies. The first winter – which takes place in the previous book – the railroad had just been built there and moved on West. Pa, who had worked for the railroad as a bookkeeper, swung a deal to stay in the surveyor’s house – a sturdy home with a full enough pantry for the entire winter, a luxury the family has never experienced before – to guard the railroad’s equipment over the winter. At the end of that winter, the family moves out to their homestead, puts up a shanty – one small room, with walls one board thick – and gets to work breaking sod to raise their first crop. The first summer, the farmers broke sod, so that they could raise a crop the second summer. Pa also buys a lot and puts up a building in town, which is springing up along the railroad at break-neck speed. That building brings in a little rent to help the family while they focus on their farm.

The Long Winter starts with the description of another home, along the wetlands at the edge of Pa’s land; the muskrat’s home has thick walls, thicker than Pa has ever seen. An early snowstorm that catches the family unprepared is followed by an Indian summer. But the flocks of birds heading south that fall fly too high overhead for him to hunt. When a Native American comes into the general store, where the men gather to play checkers and gossip, and warns them that this is going to be a particularly bad winter, Pa moves the family into town, to live in his building there which is sealed (two boards thick with a layer of tar paper between, and battens to cover the gaps between the boards). The lawyers that were renting it had headed back East for the winter, along with many others.

At first, the small town doesn’t worry: although they haven’t produced any food locally to supply them; they can rely on the railroad to bring them supplies. The kids attend school. Men head out to their farms during the day, to check up on things and bring back fodder for their animals. Women visit across the street. Although they haven’t built a church yet, it is starting to feel like a community.

Then the blizzards begin. The streets fill with snow. The kids get trapped at the school and almost get lost in a storm on their journey back to town, just a few blocks away.

School is suspended.

The railroads stop running.

Food runs short.

Fuel runs short. The affluent buy out the finished lumber from the lumberyard to burn in their stoves. Pa and Laura twist hay into sticks that they can burn in the stove. Ma makes a light from a button, a scrap of fabric, and a little grease. The house grows cold and dark – the snow blows so deep in the streets that Laura can see the feet of horses trotting past the window in her upstairs bedroom. When the winds scour that insulating snow away, the bitter winds penetrate the house. Temperatures drop.

It keeps snowing.

Pa’s hands get too cold and chapped to play the fiddle.

The family grinds raw wheat in their coffee grinder – they’ve long run out of coffee – but there comes a day when Laura looks over at their last bag of wheat and realizes it’s almost empty. There is discussion of slaughtering the milk cow and the little calf they will need to rely on when they return to their farm in the spring. It has become a choice between starvation now or starvation later. They eat the last of the potatoes and survive entirely on a course brown bread. They begin sleeping late in the mornings and going to bed early to save fuel. Some of the men in town follow a rumor a long day’s journey across the prairie and discover a man with seed wheat that they persuade him to sell, so the town doesn’t starve.

Even when spring finally comes, there’s no food: there are still no supplies in town and the supply chain is backed up with trains carrying mechanical equipment, that have been stuck on the lines all winter. The flocks of birds heading North again speed high over head to their feeding grounds in Canada, tantalizingly out of reach.

On the day that the supply train is finally expected, the grain runs out. Ma makes the last of it into six biscuits in diminishing sizes: one each for Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and little Grace. Pa’s hands shake with hunger. Then the food is gone, and the supply train doesn’t come that day.

And yet they refuse to despair. Despair, in the Little House books, is the greatest sin. No matter how grim things become, you must keep going. Eventually the warm spring chinook will blow, the snow will melt, and the supply train will come.

The end of The Long Winter, like the end of my winter of 17 snow storms, also ends with a feast and music. The family finally receives – in May – the ingredients for their Christmas feast, which have sat in a train car, entombed in snow, for the entire winter. They gather with close friends at their home and, after giving thanks and eating their first full meal in months, Pa warms up his fiddle for the first time all year, and they sing:

For what is the use of repining,
For where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Tomorrow the sun may be shining,
Although it is cloudy today.

It gets better.

If you haven’t been reading The Long Winter, this might be a good time to start.