When Laura comes down to breakfast on the first of May after the long, hard winter, she comes down singing, and Pa teases her: ”So you’re to be the Queen of May, are you?”
Those of us who live in the upper Midwest know exactly how Laura felt that first day of May, a sunny, warm day with a train coming, and the promise of summer in the air after a cold, snowy, endless winter. The bliss of sunshine, soaking into bare skin finally uncovered after months in sweaters and long underwear, helps us imagine ourselves as bulbs in the ground, stretching toward the light to bloom for spring.
The Long Winter was, and still is, one of my favorite of Laura’s work. My young imagination dwelt on the endless days of grinding wheat, feeding a family with little but squashed grain, holed up together with no one else for company, staving off the boredom and hunger and fear with little but books and music. I could perfectly hear the winds howling, and I could feel the bitter isolation of a family that had pulled together to deal with it. Ma’s fear when Pa left the shelter of that family to help sustain it by hauling hay becomes palpable as the girls take turns viewing the northwest sky to spot the clouds that could mean death for their only provider.
It’s no wonder, then, that as the family has safely made it through those moments, and those long months of deprivation, hunger, fear, and fatigue, that Laura comes down singing as May sunshine beckons.
I review that promise every spring, when ice clears itself from the lakes, and the snow drifts that pile up against my doors and line my driveway melt off into puddles and streams that make traversing the lawn a muddy pleasure. I watch eagerly for the signs of iris and tulips and daffodils pressing their leaves up through the soil toward sun that we’ve all been denied for so long, stretching to the light to bloom.
And in the first week of May, as I grade stacks of final exams and clear end-of-year reports from my desk, I can look out my window and see the promise of summer in the rituals of spring.
It does make me feel like singing.