Little House on the Prairie
Calamities and Courage
We were listening to Laura Ingles Wilder’s By the Shores of Silver Lake on my Libby app while en route to the beach today. This is the fifth of Wilder’s nine Little House on the Prairie books, which follow Laura’s family as they settle in various homesteads across America’s midwest in the 1800’s.
In this book, Laura’s older sister, Mary, goes blind after she gets scarlet fever. This isn’t the first tragedy to befall the Ingles family either. There’s grasshoppers and prairie fires and Indians and blizzards and hail. In fact, so many mishaps and tragedies befall them that my oldest son, Lee, has begun predicting what calamity will come next when Cherry Jones, the actress that reads the books, begins reading in a particular voice. Lee can tell that something bad is going to happen and he’ll make guesses as to what it is, “It’s a tornado!” “The wolves are going to get the cows!” “Someone’s going to rob them!” “The corn is going to all die!”
Despite all the calamities, the family soldiers on with bravery and cheerfulness and hope and faith and gratitude, which prompts me to look meaningfully at the children in the back seat of the car and say, “Did you hear that? They’re so happy to have one stick of candy!”
I believe in one of the books Pa says that life is full of troubles and the sooner they learn to live with troubles and get on with life, the happier they’ll be. This is not a direct quote, but that’s the gist of it. The family seems to live by it too. They don’t spend a lot of time fearing the next hardship or weeping over the lost crops or being resentful at the Indians who come and eat their food. They seem to be made of stronger stuff than I am.
In fact, when Mary goes blind in book six, Wilder describes her sister as being brave. That’s the adjective used here. Brave. Not depressed or forlorn or hopeless or angry. But brave. In fact, she couldn’t have been brave without a reason to be brave. No blindness; no bravery.
These books remind me of what’s happening in our country now. And the commentary I hear about the sad condition of our nation and, in particular, California legislature doesn’t sound that different from my son when he predicts the next Ingles’ family calamity. “Next they’ll be taking ‘In God We Trust’ off our money.” “What’s happening here is just like what happened in Communist Russia.” “They’re trying to remove Christians from the universities.”
I’m pretty sure hardships are coming. I’m pretty sure they’re guaranteed in life. And the sooner we learn to live with the troubles and get on with life, the happier I think we’ll be. And part of learning to live with these troubles is facing them with courage.
Our frontier has changed. We’re no longer facing wolves and panthers and prairie fires—although these things still exist. We’re facing a black veil of blindness falling over the masses, an ignorance, a lost desperate searching for identity and fulfillment and happiness. Those who are determined not to be overtaken by the black veil will need courage indeed.