Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist

by Stephen Hines

  We hold the earth from heaven away.

  Our faults no tenderness should ask

  The chastening stripes must cleanse them all;

  But for our blunder—oh, in shame

  Before the eyes of heaven we fall.

  Without doubt each one of us is fully entitled to pray the whole of “The Fool’s Prayer” and more especially the refrain,

  O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool.

  Let’s Revive the Old Amusements

  January 20, 1919

  The influenza epidemic has been particularly hard on farm folks, coming as it did just at the close of the season’s work when country people were beginning to relax from the strain of raising the year’s crops.1 It is at this time we usually meet one another and become acquainted again. There has been so much depending on our work, especially for the last two years, that we have attended to our business even more strictly than usual and we were really lonesome for some good times together. But, being advised by the doctors not to gather in crowds, we have stayed at home as much as possible. Let’s hope it hasn’t become a habit!

  Sometimes I wonder if telephones and motor cars are altogether blessings for country people. When my neighbor can call me up for a short visit over the phone, she is not so likely to make the necessary effort to come and spend the afternoon, and I get hungry for the sight of her face as well as the sound of her voice. When she gets into her motor car, it is almost sure to run for 12 or 15 miles before she can stop it and that takes her away down the road past me. I have no hope that my rather prosy conversation can rival the joy of a ride in the car, and we see less and less of each other.

  I am not really prejudiced against the motor car and the telephone. It is the way they are used to which I am objecting. Now when my neighbor calls me up to say she is coming over, I think very highly of the telephone as an adjunct to country life, for it gives me time to dust the mantle shelf, jump into a clean dress and shut the bedroom door. Then I can meet her serenely as tho things were always that way. But I don’t like to visit over the ’phone. I’d much rather be sitting in the same room with my neighbor, so I can see how her new dress is made and if she has another gray hair.

  There is one social affair, which used to belong to country life, that I would like to see come back again. That is the old-fashioned Friday night literary at the school house. You older people who used to attend them, did you ever enjoy yourselves better anywhere?

  At early candle light, parents and pupils from all over the district, gathered at the schoolhouse, bringing lanterns and candles and sometimes a glass lamp to give an added touch of dignity to the teacher’s desk. The lighting was good enough for eyes were stronger in the days before brilliant lights were so common. Do you remember how the school children spoke their pieces and dialogs? It gave one a touch of distinction to speak a part in a dialog.

  Then came the debate. Sometimes the older pupils of the school, sometimes a few of the pupils and some of the grownups and again just the grownups took part in the debate, and the questions debated were certainly threshed out to a conclusion. I have been thinking lately what a forum for discussing the questions of the day, political and others, the old-fashioned debate would be. I think that farmers do not discuss these things enough, among themselves, these days. They are more likely to talk them over with their banker or their merchant when they go to town, and their minds on the questions of the day, take their color from town opinion.

  We farmers are very slow to realize that we are a class by ourselves. The bankers are organized, even internationally, as a class; merchants, both wholesale and retail, are organized and working in a body for the interests of merchants; labor, except that of the farmer, his wife and children, is very much organized and yet many farmers are still contending, single handed, as individuals against these huge organizations. We are so slow to organize and to work together for our mutual interests. The old-fashioned debates at the country school house would be a place and time where farmers could discuss these things among themselves.

  An understanding, among farmers, of themselves and how their interests are affected by the questions of the hour, is seriously needed. We cannot take our opinions from our fathers nor even keep the opinions we formed for ourselves a few years ago. Times and things move too fast. We must learn to look at things, even politics, from a farmer’s standpoint. The price of hogs is more important to us than whether one political party wins an election simply as a political party. I would like to hear such timely questions discussed in an old-time debate and I really think that a training in public speaking and an understanding of public questions would be worth more to pupils of the schools than games of basketball, by exercising their brains so that they might grow into intelligent, wide-awake citizens.

  Well, the debate is finished and it is time for the spelling-down match. How earnestly we used to line up for the struggle and valiantly contest for the honor of remaining longest on the floor and how we used to laugh when some small school child spelled down an outsider, who had forgotten the lessons in the old spelling book.

  Mrs. Jones Takes the Rest Cure

  February 5, 1919

  The telephone rang sharply in Mrs. Jones’s dining room, early one summer morning, and Billy answered it for his mother was busy.

  “This is Uncle John,” said the voice on the ’phone. “We are thinking of coming out to your place for a week; it’s so awfully hot in town and the children wish to play around in the country. Tell your mother!”

  “Wait a minute,” said careful Billy and, hanging the receiver on the hook, he turned to his mother who was clearing the breakfast table and repeated the message.

  Mrs. Jones was tired that morning. It was hot in the country, too, especially over the cook stove, and there was so much work ahead that she could not see her way thru it.

  She threw up her hands with a gesture of dismay. “Oh! I’m just sick!” she exclaimed.

  Billy turned slowly to the telephone, but there was a twinkle in his eye. Tho slow of movement, he was not slow mentally and he was his mother’s right-hand man.

  “Hullo,” he said and then, “I’m afraid it won’t do. Mother’s ill,” and hung up the receiver.

  Mrs. Jones gasped. “Oh Billy!” she said, and then she thought, “Well, why not?” If John and his wife and the two boys came to be fed and waited on she would get none of the week’s work done and would be exhausted when the end of the week came. If she were ill (?) the work planned for the week would not be done, either, but at the end of the week she might be rested.

  “Well, Billy,” she said, “mother is sick. She is sick to death of this endless work, and if you will clear away the breakfast things, I believe I’ll go lie down.”

  This was the way Mrs. Jones came to take the rest cure for a week, lending the children a helping hand only now and then when they got into serious difficulty and consoling herself for her desertion of them by planning a vacation for them later.

  Everyone seems to be so overburdened these days, let’s be considerate about our visiting.

  I had company myself one day last summer. Mr. and Mrs. P and their three children drove up in their car at just 11 o’clock one morning. I welcomed them as prettily as I knew how, made them comfortable in the cool living room and said: “If you will please excuse me now, I shall get us all some dinner.”

  “Oh! We can’t stay for dinner,” said Mrs. P; “we shall stay only a few minutes.” After that I could not leave them to get dinner for the Man of The Place and his hired help, so I sat with them, trying to be entertaining, tho wondering frantically how I could hasten the dinner when I was free to get it.

  They stayed on and on. At half past 11, I again urged them to stay and tried to excuse myself from the room. They only refused again, saying they must go. But they didn’t. At a quarter to 12 I felt some way that if I should ask them again they would stay to dinner and let me get it, but I had become angry and resolved that if they should stay all day I woul
d not again ask them to eat with us. They left at a few minutes past 12, just as the men appeared in the barn door coming to dinner.

  We do enjoy company, all of us, but we are all tired. We have been working unusually hard for two years and have been under a nervous strain besides.2 We have each adjusted our burden so that we are more or less able to carry it, but a little addition to it makes it, in some cases, unbearable. It was the last feather in the camel’s load that broke his back, you know.

  Company we must have! Visiting should be more frequent that we may exchange ideas and learn to know and love one another, and there are ways that this may be made easy for us all instead of burdening one another by being inconsiderate.

  One of the pleasantest times I remember last summer was a surprise visit from a family of five persons. In the middle of the morning a team drove up and the five were unloaded at my door.

  “Daddy was coming on business,” cried one of the grown daughters “and we desired to visit with you so we just came along.”

  “Don’t be scared,” said the soft-voiced mother. “We took you by surprise so we brought a picnic dinner and we won’t let you even build a fire. Just bring out what you have cooked and let’s all picnic together.”

  They proposed eating out under the trees, but we decided it would be pleasanter to spread the dinner on the long table on the screened north porch. How simple and easy, with nobody overworked or tired, and we did have such a good visit.

  Work Makes Life Interesting

  February 20, 1919

  There is good in everything, we are told, if we will only look for it, and I have at last found the good in a hard spell of illness. It is the same good the Irishman found in whipping himself.

  “Why in the world are you doing that?” exclaimed the unexpected and astonished spectator.

  “Because it feels so good when I stop,” replied the Irishman with a grin. And this thing of being ill certainly does feel good when it stops. Why, even work looks good to a person who has been thru such an enforced idleness, at least when strength is returning. Tho I’ll confess if work crowds on me too soon, I am like the friend who was recovering from influenza rather more slowly than is usually the case.

  “I eat all right and sleep all right,” said he. “I even feel all right, but just the sight of a piece of work makes me tremble.”

  “That,” said I, “is a terrible affliction, but I have known persons who suffer from it who never had the influenza.”

  But I’m sure we will all acknowledge that there is an advantage in having been ill, if it makes us eager for work once more. Sometimes I fancy we do not always appreciate the value of work and how dry and flavorless life would be without it.

  If work were taken from us, we would lose rest also, for how could we rest unless we first became tired from working? Leisure would mean nothing to us for it would not be a prize to be won by effort and so would be valueless. Even play would lose its attraction for, if we played all the time, play would become tiresome; it would be nothing but work after all. In that case we would be at work again and perhaps a piece of actual work would become play to us. How topsy-turvy! But there is no cause for alarm. None of us is liable to be denied the pleasure of working and that it is good for us no one will deny. Man realized it soon after he was sentenced to “earn his bread by the sweat of his brow,” and with his usual generosity he lost no time in letting his womenkind in on a good thing.

  This being the case, it is particularly pleasing to read, in the advice sent out from Washington, that it would be wise the coming season not to raise any more garden stuff than will be necessary for the family use.

  Does this mean that farm women are to be let down easily from their tiptoe position of reaching out for work and still more work to keep the world rolling? It would seem a sensible thing to come about in view of the fact that according to United Press stories there is a concerted action on the part of members of the New York produce exchange to do all in their power to depress the produce and provision and grain markets regardless of the cost of production.

  Still more significant is the fact stated in a recent editorial of the Kansas City Drover’s Telegram that the “members of the New York produce exchange have evidently lined up the leaders of organized labor at Chicago and New York to assail the prices of farm products.”

  It would be the height of irony if the big companies who stand between the producer and consumer robbing both of them, should be able to line them up against each other, the laborer against the farmer; the farmer against the laborer and steal away unnoticed with their ill-gotten gains, leaving them fighting.

  Friendship Must Be Wooed

  March 5, 1919

  Sometimes we are a great trial to our friends and put an entirely uncalled for strain upon our friendships by asking foolish questions.

  The Man of the Place and I discovered, the other day, that we had for sometime been saying to our friends, “Why don’t you come over?” Can you think of a more awkward question than that? Just imagine the result if that question should always be answered truthfully. Some would reply, “Because I do not care to visit you.” Others might say, “Because it is too much trouble,” while still others who might care to come, would be swamped in trying to enumerate the many little reasons why they had not done so. We decided that we would break ourselves of such a bad habit.

  I once had a neighbor who, whenever we met, invariably asked me why I had not been to visit her. Even when I did go she met me with the query, “Why haven’t you been over before?” It was not a very pleasant greeting, and naturally one shuns unpleasantness when one may.

  I have another neighbor who will call me on the phone and say: “It has been a long time since we have seen you and we do want a good visit. Can’t you come over tomorrow?” And immediately I wish to go. It does make such a difference how things are said.

  Friendship is like love. It cannot be demanded or driven or insisted upon. It must be wooed to be won. The habit of saying disagreeable things or of being careless about how what we say affects others grows on us so easily and so surely if we indulge.

  “Mrs. Brown gave me an unhappy half hour a few days ago,” said Mrs. Gray to me. “She said a great many unpleasant things and was generally disagreeable, but it is all right. The poor old thing is getting childish and we must overlook her oddities.”

  Mrs. Gray is a comparatively new comer in the neighborhood, but I have known Mrs. Brown for years and ever since I have known her, she has prided herself on her plain speaking, showing very little regard for others’ feelings. Her unkindness appears to me not a reversion to the mentality of childhood, but simply an advance in the way she was going years ago. Her tongue has only become sharper with use and her dexterity in hurting the feelings of others grown with practice.

  I know another woman of the same age whom no one speaks of as being childish. It is not necessary to make such an excuse for her, because she is still, as she has been for 20 years, helpful and sweet and kind. And this helpfulness and sweetness and kindness of hers has grown with the passing years. I think no one will ever say of her, “poor old thing, she is childish,” as an excuse for her being disagreeable. I know she would hope to die before that time should come.

  People do grow childish in extreme old age, of course, and should be treated with tenderness because of it, but I believe that even then the character which they have built during the years before will manifest itself. There is a great difference in children, you know, and I have come to the conclusion that if we live to reach a second childhood we shall not be bad-tempered, disagreeable children unless we have indulged those traits before.

  Then there are the people who are “peculiar.” Ever meet any of them?

  The word seems to be less used than formerly, but there was a time when it was very common and I longed to shriek every time I heard it.

  “Oh! You must not do that, George will be angry. He is so peculiar!”

  “Of course, she doesn’t be
long with the rest of the crowd, but I had to invite her. She is so peculiar, you know, and so easily offended.”

  “I wouldn’t pay any attention to that. Of course, she did treat you abominably but it is just her way. She is so peculiar.”

  And so on and on. I thought seriously of cultivating a reputation for being peculiar, for like charity such a reputation seemed to cover multitudes of sins, but I decided that it would be even more unpleasant for me than for the other fellow; that it would not pay to make myself an unlovely character for the sake of any little, mean advantage to be gained by it.

  Keep the Saving Habit

  March 20, 1919

  “We may have all the sugar we want now,” said an acquaintance the other day as he picked up the sugar bowl and emptied the last of its contents of about 4 or 5 spoons of sugar into his coffee cup.

  “We may have all the sugar we wish now—if we have the money to pay for it,” remarked a friend to me as we sat at table together, a few days later. And he helped himself to 1 spoon of sugar for his coffee.

  It is interesting to notice the difference in the way people are reacting from the strain and struggle of the war. Some evidently feel that since the war is over all restraints are removed and are going back to their old, reckless ways of spending and waste. Others have thoroly learned the lesson of carefulness and economy. “When I make over an old hat or dress and save buying new, I save something when prices are as high as they are now,” I overheard one woman say to another and I thought she was entirely right.

  It is surely worth one’s time to be careful of clothing now and to take the time to repair and make over. If we will think of how much we accomplished by being careful with food, we cannot help but realize that it pays to eliminate waste in that direction. There has been so much loss and suffering and cost in the war that we should carefully salvage from its wreck all the good that is in any way possible to bring out of it.