Guest post by Eddie Higgins

Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.  I know this from watching It’s a Wonderful Life.  In Laura land however, the double strings of Prince and Lady’s sleigh bells mean the joy of a trip home – and the cautious beginning of a romance, since Almanzo has decided to step up his courting under the cunning guise of a favour to Pa, fetching Laura home for the weekend.

This is just about my favourite chapter, and I think it’s one that you appreciate more as an adult – or someone who has left home – than you can possibly do as a child, when the idea of leaving home doesn’t mean much, or it’s something way in the future. All week Laura has been steeling herself to the thought of having to spend the weekend at the Brewsters, tempered by a tiny hope she hardly dares to allow herself that Pa might come to her rescue. Instead it’s Almanzo – he may not be on a white charger, but Prince and Lady and the new cutter are so much more practical for prairie travel. As a romantic ploy, it’s a master-stroke.

Laura’s already dismissed school a little early (I know she says the storm is getting worse, but even so, can’t help feeling you aren’t supposed to quit work just because your ride home has turned up) and Clarence dashes outside to admire Almanzo’s horses while Laura sorts out Ruby’s wraps (just so we know she is still conscientious), and then they set off.  They have to stop at the Brewsters’ so Laura can pick up her things and drop off the dinner pail, and Almanzo shows some disgust.  (Harsh from the man who advocated constant eating to save on doing the dishes in Long Winter.)  But I suppose it shows Laura and Almanzo are in synch about the Brewsters, and Laura isn’t inclined to waste time thinking about the Brewsters.  Then they are off.  The conversation they have on the way home is so sweet.  Laura is in the Flutterbudget ‘speak before thinking’ mode that Pa counselled her against, realises it, resolves to do better, and then does it again straight away.  The cutter is 26 inches wide at the bottom, which I just measured as half the width of the desk I’m sitting at typing this.  Tight squeeze!

Then all of a sudden she is HOME and the really good stuff starts (isn’t “Ma’s smile lighted her whole face” a lovely expression?).  Here’s why I love this chapter:  it’s the perfect expression of the unspeakable joy of returning to the haven of the ‘homefolks’ from the terrors of the big wide world.  There really is nothing like going away to make you appreciate home. Everything is as it was – the house, the family, Kitty, the news from Mary, school and the town, the food, the fiddle music – yet different, because Laura is seeing it with new eyes, having had her first, not very pleasant, taste of fending for herself.  I feel like I’ve come home myself when I read this, and my own throat aches a little along with Laura.

After a perfect evening, Laura wakes up still noticing all those little things which make the happy home: everyone says good morning, pleasant talk at the table, and even the housework.  Laura’s meaning to put a brave face on the time she’s having at the Brewsters’ but she confesses to Carrie, who (in a bit of a Jane Austen moment) can only suggest marriage as a solution. Laura’s firmly on the page of wanting to stay at home forever (and just in case anyone is reading along for the first time I’m not saying a word about how that pans out).

Next Laura pops out into town to see Mary Power and find out where the town class is up to, while her wash water heats.  Laura finds she even likes the town now, and I give a little cheer for Gerald Fuller, as he lifts his cap to her – as does Mr Bradley (does anyone else find themselves paying more attention to the minor characters as we do the readalongs?  I find I’ve become very fond of Mr Bradley), and calls Laura “Miss Ingalls”.  “Laura felt very grown up”.  I love this, though I’m not quite sure why exactly.  I suppose Laura gets a flash of seeing herself as others see her – in a grown-up job, therefore a grown-up.  And, as we find out in a moment, with a beau, according to Mary Powers, much to Laura’s embarrassment and denial.  “Everything is simple when you are alone, or at home, but as soon as you meet other people you are in difficulties,” she says, in a sudden entry into the second person. Quite!  On the other hand, the Almanzo situation does give the chance for a little crowing over Nellie Oleson, slightly to Mrs Powers’s disapproval.

Back home, washing, redoing her hat, ‘talking all the time with Ma and Carrie and Grace’ and Laura is still musing on the truth of appreciating something more when you have less of it.  Now there’s only Sunday morning left, which means best clothes, church – and Ida, who is the only other person apart from Carrie to whom Laura confides her dislike of teaching. Laura uses the idle time during Reverend Brown’s ‘stupid’ sermon (is it just me, or is Laura getting a little more curt now she’s a grown-up?) to muse on the passage of time, and growing up generally. And, with the return to school imminent, she’s now worrying about managing the school, and Clarence in particular.  So now Laura has learnt the Friday ‘hurrah I don’t need to think about work for two days’ feeling and the Sunday ‘oh no, back to work tomorrow’ feeling.  While enjoying Sunday lunch, Laura’s joy lets the cat out of the bag to Pa that she is not enjoying staying at the Brewsters’.  His advice is to keep a stiff upper lip – about which there is more to come in the next chapter.

Finally, it’s time to go back to school.  Pa baffles Laura and Ma by delaying starting – he and Almanzo have clearly been plotting.  The feminist in me feels I should object to this, but I love the way Pa acts as unofficial sponsor of Almanzo’s courting efforts.  I wonder exactly how that particular conversation went. Finally Almanzo arrives and Laura is off back to school in a further jingle of sleigh bells.  I never actually noticed before that the chapter doesn’t just begin with sleigh bells, it ends with them as well.  A weekend of joy with sleigh bell bookends.  I like that.

Guest post by Karen

First Day of School, Laura wakes up in the unpleasant Brewster house instead of home, and plunges out of her couch bed into a cold morning. Mr. Brewster sets off to start a fire in the schoolhouse, which was nice for Laura as apparently that would have been her job in some schools. Maybe if she’d been a male teacher? (Teaching timeline: http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html and one-room schoolhouses:http://hoover.nara.gov/LIW/DeSmet/desmet_oneroomschool.html)

Another “delicious” meal of fried salt pork and potatoes for breakfast. (Wikipedia: Salt pork or white bacon is salt-cured pork. It is prepared from one of three primal cuts: pork side, pork belly, or fatback. Long used as a shipboard ration, salt pork now finds use in traditional American cuisine, particularly Boston baked beans, pork and beans, and to add its flavor to vegetables cooked in water, or with greens as in soul food.) Laura tries to make small talk with Mrs. Brewster and be helpful, but the woman is just unhappy and unfriendly. Clinical depression? Seasonal affective disorder? Living a hard life of isolation on the prairie when she wants to return home (as we learn later); I pity both her and her husband and neglected child.

Caught between the rock and hard place of the unpleasant Brewster home and the frightening prospect of teaching school, Laura soldiers ahead and arrives at the drafty, small one-room schoolhouse. Five students, three of whom are older than Laura, face her at her teachers’ table. She takes their names and ages once the clock strikes nine. They have meager resources, just some shared books and a chalkboard at the front of the room. Once they get through the logistics of who is at what place in their studies, it’s time for a fifteen-minute recess. The “kids” go out to “play in the snow” while Laura uses the time to plan the rest of the day.

The students take turns reading aloud until it’s time for the hour-long noon lunch break. (My modern, efficient side wonders why they didn’t use just half an hour for lunch to get finished with the day earlier, but in thinking about it the children probably enjoyed this rare opportunity to socialize with each other.)  Laura eats her lunch of bread and butter alone while the students talk and eat and the boys run races outside.

The fire is fueled by coal here on the largely woodless prairie, and more needs to be added after lunch. We get the sense that Clarence is quick-witted and impish while Charles is a bit slow and Martha, his sister, is sweet-tempered and quicker on the uptake. In an era of physical punishment, Laura wonders how she will discipline Clarence if it needs to happen, since he is a “chunky, husky boy, bigger than she was, and older.”

Even with just five students, Laura has them come to the front to recite, just as in the town school. She has to punish the two older boys for not knowing their lessons well, and sends them to the board to write the words they missed. Clarence says the board’s too small, but Laura sweetly tells him to erase his words and write smaller.

The day ends at four o’clock. They bundle up for their 1/2 or 1 mile walks home. Laura worries that she won’t see a blizzard coming given the school’s layout, but finishes her tidying up and heads to the Brewsters’. “Her first day as a teacher was over. She was thankful for that.”

Guest post by Naomi

But Pa knows that Laura is scared, so he opens the conversation. “You are a school teacher now!” And Laura admits that she IS scared.  She’s little, she’s only 15; how can she teach school?  Getting her certificate required that she diagram complex and compound sentences and recite the whole of U.S. history from memory, but she knows nothing about actually teaching school. Interestingly, Laura’s concerns have nothing to do with how she will teach – how she will pass on her knowledge —  but rather, how will she make the children behave? Which says a lot about how schools worked back then.  But Pa assures her that she’s never failed at anything she’s attempted, so she will succeed at this too. (I have a daughter who was also ‘little’ at 15. I can’t imagine her teaching school at that age!)

Laura has never spent a single night away from her family, but now her whole life is about to change.

Finally, after 12 cold miles (a trip that would take us about 10-15 minutes in our warm heated cars but probably took them an hour or more), they arrive at Brewster’s.  And there, Laura soon finds that much is familiar, even pleasant.  The shanty looks much like the one on Pa’s claim; two tightly-battened tar-paper rooms. Yes, it’s smaller than Pa’s shanty, but seems ample for a family of 3. (As Laura says later, enough is as good as a feast.) The furniture too is adequate: a cook stove, a dining table and chairs, a high chair for Johnny, a clock on the wall, a white table cloth, a rocking chair, a large bed, a bureau and trunk, and even a store-bought sofa where Laura will sleep. There are feather pillows, sheets and plenty of quilts on the sofa. We learn later that there is a bench for the washbowl and a looking glass.  There is also a stable where Mr. Brewster has at least one cow (they still have milk and butter in the winter, so there are probably two cows) and horses or oxen for his trips to town and farm work.  And there are, presumably, a privy and chamber pot, but those are never mentioned in the books. The food is good and ample; the same familiar salt pork, gravy, bread and potatoes that have always made up the bulk of the Ingalls’ winter diet. There is even a cat.  How can life be bad with a cat in the house?

But all is not familiar and much is not pleasant. There are no loving sisters to talk to, but a squalling, neglected, runny-nosed toddler.  There is no cheerful conversation at the dinner table, but glum silence broken only by toddler tantrums.  Despite her claim that she spends her days ‘slaving’, Mrs. Brewster is evidently a slovenly housekeeper because the table cloth is dirty and the table carelessly set. There is no cozy fiddle music after supper, but more silence. There are no books. Last week’s newspaper has probably been used to start the cookstove, or torn up for use in the never-mentioned privy. So Laura gets out her school books, sets herself lessons to study, and struggles through the long evening hours before she can finally go to bed.  And once she is there, the silence ends. Through the thin partition she overhears Mrs. Brewster complaining. While most lonely homestead wives would welcome another woman to talk to, Mrs. Brewster views her as only one more trial and burden in her miserable life.  A miserable life that Laura must look forward to sharing for the next 8 weeks.  12 miles is too far to travel often.