My daughter started The Long Winter over the weekend. I am keeping quiet and remaining low-key. She has no idea how thrilled I am, which is the only way she’ll finish the series.
She recently completed By The Shores of Silver Lake. That actually took a little while to get into. We forget, as veteran readers, what a jolt it can be to move from the little girl who rolled down straw stacks to the more sedate teenager, responsible for making up the lost sight of her now-blind sister and grieving the death of her dog. “I don’t like this very much,” my daughter said after Jack died. And then: “When does Mary stop being blind?”
But she got through it. A lot of the time she’s silent when she reads, so I try to gauge her interest by asking questions. After Silver Lake was done, I asked her favorite part. She asked mine back. OK. I liked Laura and Carrie sliding on the moonpath on the ice, I said. Oh, she said. She liked when Laura hung out with Lena and Gene.
Otherwise she didn’t volunteer anything. “Anytime anything doesn’t make sense,” it occurred to me to say, “feel free to ask me whatever questions you like. If there’s anything you don’t understand, I can help you.”
To my surprise, she had a question ready. “What word is this?” she asked, pointing to a passage in the chapter “Building Boom.”
What on earth is Pa doing?” [Laura] asked Ma.
“He’s putting up a building on the town site.”
“Who for?” Laura asked, beginning to sweep. Her fingers were shrunken in ridges, from being so long in the dishwater.
“‘For whom, Laura,’” Ma corrected her.
“Whom” was the word. Surprisingly difficult to explain to a six-year-old, but I did the best I could.
And then I thought about Ma and grammar. I thought ahead to Little Town on the Prairie, when Carrie is looking out the window reporting on the actions of Mr. Boast and Lew Brewster, who have come to hire Laura for school.
“That’s him now, at the door!”
“That is he,” said Ma.
And later …
It was only a moment before Carrie exclaimed, “That’s him now—“
“’This is he,’” Ma said almost sharply.
“That’s he coming—It don’t sound right, Ma—“
“’Doesn’t sound right,’” said Ma.
“Right straight across from Fuller’s Hardware!”
Does anyone else besides me find this passage hilarious? First of all, we’ve never been aware of Carrie as a particularly lazy grammarian, nor, to a lesser degree, of Ma as grammar enforcer (although it’s easy to assume she would be). But all of a sudden—maybe the Hard Winter got to her?—Carrie can’t seem to speak a coherent sentence. And Ma, in her gentle way, corrects her and corrects her, finally on the edge of losing her cool and speaking “almost sharply.” When Ma gets sharp—or almost sharp—one would expect this to be the final grammar infraction, but alas, it’s the second-to-last. Carrie still has one more in her. (And, in my opinion, replacing “doesn’t” with “don’t” is a far more egregious error than misusing objective pronouns.) But Ma calms back down anyway, even as she corrects Carrie a third time.
I’ve long pondered Laura the author’s use of “almost sharply.” This is to imply that Ma otherwise would never speak sharply. We know, of course, that this isn’t true of Laura, not the Little House character Laura, nor the adult parent of cunning, precocious Rose or wife to “the Oyster.” Looking back to her childhood while in her sixties, Laura saw her mother as a paragon of calm. Or so it seems to this reader. I wonder if she ever wished—well into her adulthood—that she was more like her Ma, and writing about her serene ways was one way of honoring her, the type of mother she couldn’t quite be. And then I can’t help but wonder if Laura would have been more like Ma as a parent if Rose hadn’t been … so like Rose.
Eh, it’s fun to think about, anyway. Grammar nerds unite!