Someone asked me that last week. And, although I have a collection that I’ve written about before, that I read every year, I chose to talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter.

The theme of this book is resilience.

I would even say that is the theme of most of The Little House series of books, with the possible exceptions of Little House in the Big Woods, which is about Laura’s simple life as a young pioneer girl, and Farmer Boy, which is about Laura’s husband, Almanzo’s, life as the son of a wealthy and successful settled farmer in New York State.

The Long Winter tells the story of how Laura’s family survived a winter of blizzards that started in early October and continued into April. At this point, they had moved to the Dakota Territory, where the small town along the train tracks has just that year sprung up. The farmers have just arrived and haven’t grown crops yet; so, the town is completely dependent on the railroad for supplies.

And the railroad lets them down. The snows between the town and the supplies back east are too deep, the tracks can’t be kept clear. And the town is on their own.

By the end of this horrible winter, the Ingalls family is down to eating wheat ground in a hand-cranked coffee-grinder and mixed with water to make little pancakes or biscuits, one per person. They live alone in their home, isolated from their neighbors by the howling winds that pile the snow up to the window sills on the second floor, and then scour it clean again.

The children are unable to go to school because a blizzard could come up and strand them at the school which is a little outside town. In fact, one came up earlier in the year and the children, frightened of freezing to death if the blizzard continued for days, make their way with their teacher and an adult who came to help them, back towards town, unable to see the buildings for the snow. The danger is real, as many children found out that winter, when they walked past their homes and were lost in the blizzard. In fact, Laura and these children escape wandering out to the open prairie only when one of them bumps a shoulder against the corner of an unseen house on the edge of town.

Starvation is a real possibility. The stores have no food to sell. A hunting trip earlier in the book went awry. The Ingalls family has actually run out of food in their home, and Pa comments that other families are also running out, when Almanzo and another young man make a daring trip to a nearby settler on a rumor that he exists and a hope that, if he does, he’ll sell his seed wheat to them at an exorbitant price so that they can sell it to the community at cost.

Towards the end of the book, the family is huddled around their stove, in the meager heat of braided straw for there is no more coal or wood in town to burn unless they burn the furniture, when another blizzard hits. And Pa loses it.

“Pa rose with a deep breath. ‘Well, here it is again.’

“Then suddenly he shook his clenched fist at the northwest. ‘Howl! blast you! howl!’ he shouted. ‘We’re all here safe! You can’t get at us! You’ve tried all winter but we’ll beat you yet! We’ll be right here when spring comes!’”

Ma chides him, reminding him it’s only a blizzard and they’re used to them. Pa replies, dropping back into his chair. “That was foolish, Caroline. Seemed for a moment like that wind was something alive, trying to get at us.”

I woke up the other day thinking about this scene and wondering…

Who was Pa really yelling at?

Pa loses his temper so few times in the series. In Little House on the Prairie, Pa almost swears at the wagon-cover, when the wind repeatedly snatches it out of his hand, but when Ma chastises his language, his eye has a twinkle and he teases her.

And again, at the end of that book, when Pa has just learned that he had built his precious little farm on territory promised to the indigenous tribes. Laura had just been reflecting on how promising the farm was: it had survived wildfires and conflict with their indigenous neighbors; the family had survived malaria and a fire in the chimney. They had made friends with other settlers. They had planted a thriving house garden and crops. Pa had made a profit from the furs of the animals he had killed in the area. He had even bought glass for the windows of their log cabin. They were healthy and happy and full of hope.

When Pa finds out that he doesn’t own title to his land, he’s so mad that he sells off his stock that day, packs up the wagon, and whisks the family away, leaving their tiny little slice of heaven behind, and the latchstring out, in case someone needs shelter.

So, who is Pa yelling at?

The scene where Pa yells at the blizzard is, in my mind, a turning point in the book series. Up to this point, the family has been poor. They have built homes in the woods, on the prairie, along Plum Creek. And left or lost those homes.

On the Prairie, your heart breaks when Pa packs the girls up and drives the wagon away. Laura peeks out the back of the wagon, watching their promising farm get further and further away.

On Plum Creek – the saddest of all the books – they settle in Minnesota. Pa sells the little pioneer ponies that Laura has come to love. They end up living in a dugout along the creek, much to Ma’s chagrin: a dirt home. The girls walk to school, in short, faded dresses that they’ve outgrown, and barefoot. Nellie and Willy make fun of them for being poor and Nellie is mean to Jack. The girls give up Christmas presents so that Pa can buy horses to work the land; and the next year, when Pa is caught in a blizzard, they can’t afford presents and Pa, trapped in a snow cave, eats their Christmas candy to stay alive.

When his crop finally looks promising, Pa gets so excited that he buys expensive pre-milled lumber, doors with knobs, glass windows in sashes, a Franklyn stove on credit – to build Ma her house of dreams.

And then the locusts destroy his crops and Pa is forced to walk hundreds of miles in worn out boots and a torn coat to hire on as a migrant worker for months to feed his family. And the locusts return a second year.

Between Plum Creek and the next book, Silver Lake, much of the family comes down with scarlet fever and Mary goes blind. Scarlet Fever is a bacterial disease and, in those days, it was common practice to prevent the spread or reinfection by burning the bedding and possessions of the infected person. Ma, Mary, Carrie, and baby Grace all had Scarlet Fever, so much of their possessions must have had to be replaced. And now, in addition to the unpaid mortgage on the house and land, there are doctor’s bills to be paid.

Silver Creek gives the family a break – a winter in a house that must have seemed like a mansion to them, equipped with food and fuel that they won’t have to pay for, in exchange for watching over railroad equipment. But before that, Pa is threatened by a mob of angry railroad workers who want to be paid for the two-week lag in the payroll. And after that, Pa hurries off to file his claim, only to get caught in a mob of homesteaders who want the same plot of land.

It hasn’t been an easy life for Pa, to see his American Dream held out before him and lost again and again. He has lived a good life, caring for others, for his family. He has worked hard and lived honestly. And, like Job, his reward is withheld.

In my mind, that is what his outburst is about. Yes, it’s about yet another storm, when storms would usually be tapering off. About his chapped hands that prevent him from playing the fiddle, his solace when things go bad. About watching his family shivering and hungry, and knowing that there is little he can for them.

And yet, this is the worst of it.

The family survives.

In the next chapter, the trains resume. The family receives a Christmas barrel sent by their favorite pastor, filled with a turkey dinner (which remained frozen in the sub-zero temperatures all winter) and beautiful hand-me-down clothes and books from wealthy parishioners.

For the rest of the Little House series, things look up: the crops come in, their house expands, Laura and Carrie end up excelling in school. They can even afford Ma’s dream: to send Mary to a college for the blind. They can afford to give Laura frivolous name cards like her friends have.

There is conflict, between Laura and a bully school-mistress. There is the sadness of missing Mary. Although it’s not stated outright, I suspect some worry about Carrie’s lingering health problems (after Plum Creek, she is regularly described as thin and pale and weak).

But they are safe, well-housed, well-fed, dressed in clothes and shoes that fit and are in good condition.

Pa’s outburst is the turning point.

To put the outburst in context, the cardinal sin that I’ve taken from these books is to despair.

You see pictures of despair throughout the series.

In Little House on the Prairie, the Ingalls family comes upon an older couple, newly come from back East, too naïve to realize that they’d need a dog to protect them on the road, to use chain instead of rope for their horses at night. Horse thieves stole their team and they’re sitting in their wagon on a little-used trail, unwilling to leave their possessions to hitch a ride with the family to town.

Despair breeds inactivity.

In Little Town on the Prairie, when Laura is drafted as a school teacher for a tiny community located hours away from De Smet (The Little Town), she boards with a couple and their toddler in a one-room shanty. The wife is angry and withdrawn and Laura awakens one night to find the woman standing over her husband with a butcher knife. She is yelling at him, demanding that they return back East. She is exhausted from the manual labor, caring for their son, cabin-fevered from being trapped indoors in a Dakota winter.

In despair.

It was not unusual for isolated settlers to fall into despair.

They called it “prairie madness” or “prairie fever.” Worn out by harsh living conditions and isolation, they grew depressed, withdrew, cried. They stopped caring about how they looked; they withdrew from social interactions. Sometimes they lashed out in violence. Sometimes they turned the violence within and committed suicide.

Throughout the books, Ma and Pa do their best to keep the spirits of their family up. Ma repeatedly hides food and brings it out when all seems lost, as a treat. She turns home schooling into a game for the girls, encouraging them to compete against each other to see who can remember the longest poems or history lessons from their school books. She encourages them to put aside letters or magazines sent to them from afar, to give themselves something to look forward to. Pa plays his fiddle or tells stories to cheer up the family.

When Pa lets down his guard, shaking his fist at the heavens, Ma reels him back in, doing her best to keep him from falling into despair.

So, who is Pa yelling at?

Is he really going after the storm that descends just as the family was hoping for spring?

Or is he railing at a god who, although Pa has done all he can to “paddle his own canoe”, continues to deprive him of his just reward, continues to torture his family?

Or is yelling at himself, so full of wander that – even as De Smet grows up around him bringing the community and school and church and civilization that Ma so craves for herself and her girls – his eyes rise to the horizon and dream of a trail West to Oregon?

So full of wander that his trail has brought them here to suffer and perhaps starve in the blizzards?

And so, he yells.

This is why I read this book every year.

This is my favorite book, that I read time and again, year after year. Because it urges me to keep going, not to give up, not to despair.

My life is nothing like the Ingalls’ family. I live in a big city, not an isolated town. I am surrounded by abundance. There is a grocery store in my building that, even during Covid, remained fully stocked. If I am lonely, I can go online and find some kind of workshop or class or gathering, where I can go and meet people.

But, even surrounded by others, isolation is real. When you are trapped in your own mind, prey to doomscrolling – and what doom there is these days – keeping up your spirits is essential to continued existence. Taking one step, then another, and another. Not giving in to apathy, to media-bingeing, to wearing pajamas all day, and constantly consuming consuming consuming.

Finding things to look forward to.

The opposite of despair is joy: an immediate burst of feeling good.

What causes you joy?

Last week, I took part in a conference call about joy, of course led by Canadians. We all came up with different silly things that would make us laugh during the call – one participant, every time someone used the word joy, sang out “Hallelujah!” I, whenever someone said a name on the call, released a shower of little hearts on the screen. Other people donned silly hats or avatars. Silly little things, indeed. So silly that they made us laugh.

The perfect cure for the end of a winter that just seems so long in so many ways…

I call the tree in this photo, The Spring Tree, because every day for 20 years, I passed it on my way to work. And in the spring, it would bud and finally burst into bloom like fireworks all overnight.

And then I knew it was spring.

Joy.