By now the blizzards are coming to life in Laura’s dreams as monsters, as she sleeps to the sound of the ice-sand scouring the roof. That scouring noise of the blizzards—a recurring description throughout the book—has always struck me as an unforgettable detail: it’s a sound that I imagine is practically foreign to us now that we live in more insulated homes.
Anyway, things are grim. Have the past few chapter summaries been saying that, too? Well, the grimness has progressed: the roof-nails have clumps of frost on them now; Laura and Pa’s hands are chapped and cut from twisting the hay sticks, and the rough hay has worn away their coats in the places where they held the bundles in place to twist them. For breakfast the Ingallses eat the brown bread dipped in tea, and for dinner they have potatoes, which they divide carefully, letting Pa have the extra one to keep up his strength.
If only it had been that fair in real life: remember that recent post about that other family who lived with the Ingalls family during the Long Winter? Remember how George Masters was kind of a jerk? Yeah, he totally hogged the potatoes. In her unpublished “Pioneer Girl” manuscript, Laura writes that as the potato supply dwindled, George would help himself to them first (even though he wasn’t doing any chores because he considered himself a paying boarder). Reportedly he’d scarf them so fast he’d burn his mouth and then exclaim, “Potatoes do hold the heat!” a phrase that eventually became an in-joke in the Ingalls family denoting selfishness. You really can’t blame Laura for writing him out of The Long Winter and rationing the fictional potatoes to favor Pa.
During the day, Ma rallies the girls by encouraging them to recite speeches and verses from the Independent Fifth Reader (thank goodness they have something else besides Millbank, though I suspect Laura can recite that book, too), and Pa hauls loads of hay. Then one day comes a “still morning” when Laura comes downstairs and Pa shows her the tunnel of snow he’s dug from the lean-to door to the stable.
That’s right, folks: the house is buried in the snow. Laura runs upstairs and looks out the window and sees Main Street at eye level, and watches the hooves of the Wilder boys’ horses as they trot by. As a kid, this part was amazing to me—perhaps even more so because the Blizzard of ‘79 in Chicago was a recent memory, and while that winter hadn’t produced snow that was deep enough to bury the first floor of a house, it helped me understand that such things were possible. (How did the children of De Smet resist going sledding off their own rooftops? Oh, I guess they probably couldn’t get outside.)
For once, the snow and the cold are respites: the kitchen is insulated by the deep snowdrifts, and the cold holds the tunnel in place. The wind doesn’t blow, and for two days everything feels strangely quiet.
Then another storm sets in, and both Pa and Ma lose it for a moment—Pa curses the “gosh dang blizzard,” which “only lets go long enough to spit on its hands,” and Ma snaps back at him for swearing.
More coping and more bibilotherapy. This time Pa reads aloud from big green book of animals by the light of the button lamp. But Laura can’t quite escape into the words this time, because the relentless winds and the numbing routines are taking their toll on her. Suddenly she interrupts Pa’s reading and asks him to play the fiddle. Good idea!
Oh, but maybe it isn’t. The fiddle is brought out, and Pa attempts a few bars of “Bonnie Doon,” but his playing is off—his fingers, he says, are too stiff and thick from the cold to play properly. It’s one of the very lowest points of the family’s endurance—the music is gone, Pa is embarrassed he can’t play, and Laura feels awful for asking him to play. At least there is wheat to grind—as wearying as the routine is, the preparation of the daily bread gives the family something to do. Pa goes out to do his chores (yet again), and Ma sits by the stove and sings a hymn to the girls.