News

Marie Howe has an essay in the latest O magazine, Reading Little House on the Prairie With My Daughter, in which she turns, as the wise do again and again, to Ma, Pa, Laura, Mary (AND JACK THE BRINDLE BULLDOG) for how to make do when you’ve lost what you do.

It was a cold winter in New York, bitter cold, stinging cold. The economic downturn had become a recession. Every week brought more news of layoffs and cutbacks. Day after day that February we pulled on layers to go to school and work, then scarves and hats and mittens, and we bent into the wind as we walked toward the river. The Ingallses by that time were living in a shack—blizzards blew across the prairie so hard and thick they couldn’t see out their small windows for days. The girls woke up to their quilts coated with ice. They were starving and weak and broke. Pa checked and fed the animals, Ma made dinner, be it only potatoes, and the girls cleaned up, tended the baby. My own salary was frozen and threatened. I lay awake at night, a single mother, wondering what I would do if…, tossing and waking with worry.

(I have babbled along these lines several times: see my essay “Cold Comfort: In Which I Don’t Even Try to Fight the Metaphor” on The Long Winter in Jezebel; “Buck Up: Life Lessons From Young Heroines” on All Things Considered; and a [popup] clip from a recent Los Angeles Times Book Festival panel in which I talk about how the Little House books were heartwarming, not so much.)