The weather is turning toward spring with the promise of fresh flowers and warm, windy summer mornings. Ben worked hard to get our roto-tiller fixed in time to ‘plow’ the garden, but the weather outpaced us. We ended up turning it over by hand so that we could start planting the cool weather vegetables. The last two weekends we’ve planted potatoes, garlic, onions, carrots, and two kinds of lettuce. I love working in the garden – it is a state of being surrounded with good things. I feel the worn wooden handles of the shovel and hoe turning the firm soil into soft, loamy ground. I hear the birds calling to each other – sometimes a hawk cry pierces the air – I enjoy the sharp ‘shnick’ of the shovel slicing the hard dirt. Spring has an earthy perfume – wholesome and potent with the promise of rain and sunshine.
Of course, some of the best thinking can be done while gardening. The simple toil lends itself to musing. Gardening always makes me think of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I planted carrots on Sunday and thought of Alice having to push her hoops back to drop the tiny carrot seeds in the hole she dug with her big toe. I thought about the vegetable garden that the Ingalls had to leave on the Prairie in Indian Country and Pa trying to joke about the rabbit feast. I think about the vicious blackbirds that ate the corn in Little Town in the Prairie and how Ma made a ‘chicken pie’ out the ones Pa shot.
I admire the self-reliance of the characters in those books. They worked hard and lived hard, but found joy in it. They rose to meet their challenges--they had to in order to survive. “Success is a habit,” Pa said to Laura as she prepared to teach her first school term. I remind myself of that often. It’s unapologetic – it makes no distinction between socio-economic status, gender, or ability. Success is measured by your individual initiative, creativity, and hard work. It reminds me of other favorite quote: “The necessary is always possible.”
Laura was a remarkable woman. She was born in 1867 (two years after the Civil War ended) and she died at the ripe old age of 90 in 1957. She lived through the Industrial Revolution, WWI, the roaring twenties, the great depression, and WWII. When she was born, Andrew Johnson was president – when she died, Dwight Eisenhower was in office. She only missed Lincoln and JFK by a couple of years.
She saw the innovation of barbed wire, the telephone, the carpet sweeper, the Edison phonograph, toilet paper, fountain pen, escalators, zippers, Cinematographe, bicycles, the car, Zepplins, Teddy Bears, Airplanes, radios, teabags, helicopters, hand-cranked and motorized motion picture cameras, toasters, band-aids, penicillin, scotch tape, jet engines, drive-in movie theaters, radar, color TV, microscopes, silly putty, the atomic bomb, microwave ovens, credit cards and superglue.
As a fiercely independent woman, you might have thought that she would be a raging feminist of Susan B Anthony acclaim…but she actually looked down on the movement. (Which is why she is has not been canonized by the feminist orthodoxy.) The movement toward industrialization and urbanization was the trend that reduced women to their ‘trophy wife’ status at the turn of the century and caused affluent, urban women to demand equal rights to work and vote.
As a farmer’s wife, Laura Wilder considered herself free and independent to work hard and be an equal member in running the farm. She and Almanzo had a private competition to see whose livestock would draw the larger profit. Almanzo raised the large livestock and Laura kept him on his toes by running a substantial chicken farm. She took pride in her work and her status as her husband's support.
I’ll have to dig up the book I found of her later writings – mostly articles published in newspapers and private letters. It’s like talking with a wise, old aunt. I especially enjoy her thoughts on marriage. She and Almanzo had a difficult life, but they were a team – equal partners with different responsibilities. I often think about her when driving to work in the mornings. Although I’m in the working world, I consider my role as a wife to be very similar. Ben and I are both working toward building a secure home for our future family. We’re equal members of the same ‘team’ working toward the same goals.
‘Equal but different’ doesn’t have a very popular ring to it in our current society – it recalls the segregationist slogans of the Jim Crow era. However, in a marriage, there is true harmony in being ‘separate but equal.’ But…maybe more on that in another post.
“Equal but Different” – Anyone else want to weigh in? Or am I rushing in where angels fear to tread?
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