Beyond the low river the grassy land was low curve behind low curve and the road looked like a short hook.
“The road pushes against the grassy land and breaks off short. And that’s the end of it,” said Laura.
“It can’t be,” Mary objected. “The road goes all the way to Silver Lake.”
“I know it does,” Laura answered.
“Well, then I don’t think you ought to say things like that,” Mary told her gently. “We should always be careful to say exactly what we mean.”
“I was saying what I meant,” Laura protested. But she could not explain. There were so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying them. – By the Shores of Silver Lake
I spent the afternoon reading Erin Blakemore’s The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons, From Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder (HarperCollins Publishers, 2010). I was excited to see that it included some old favorites – Pride & Prejudice, Gone With the Wind, Little Women, and Jane Eyre. I had put aside Charlotte Bronte’s Villette when The Heroine’s Bookshelf arrived in the mail today, and how can I help but love a book that includes not only personal favorites, but two Georgia authors?
Of the 12 chapters, the one centered around Wilder’s The Long Winter tells us that “simplicity becomes more and more desirable as daily life gets more complex” (page 132), and it gives examples of how the Ingalls family focused on “people instead of things” and that in their struggle for survival, “when they left the little house near Independence, Kansas, the Ingallses even dug up the seed potatoes growing in their garden.”
Whoa. I’ve been reading Little House on the Prairie for 45-plus years and not once did I ever think that the family dug up the garden to eat the seed potatoes they had planted. I immediately thought of the friend who once said that for many years, when she read about the Indians almost taking the bundle of furs and Ma saying that “the plow and all our seeds for next year are in that bundle of furs,” (see Chapter 17, “The Tall Indian”), she pictured actual seeds wrapped up in the furs, not grasping the concept that Pa would trade the furs for seeds. As Laura herself told us, “There are so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of telling them.”
In Chapter 25, “Soldiers,” Wilder tells us that Pa “had planted some early sod potatoes, and some potatoes were saved to plant later.” There is some unknown passage of time during which garden stuffs are growing (sweet potatoes, cabbages, onions, carrots, peas, beans, turnips, and the early sod potatoes), and Pa is busy planting corn when Mr. Edwards and Mr. Scott come to talk, and Pa announces stops work in the middle of the day to say that they are leaving in the morning! It must be true, Laura realizes, when she sees Mr. Scott leaving with the cow and calf that Pa has given him.
Pa unhitches Pet and Patty from the plow, and Laura and Mary are still doing the dishes when Pa comes in, carrying the potato-sack. “Cook a plenty for dinner! We’ve been going without potatoes, saving them for seed. Now we’ll eat ‘em up!” So that day they are the seed potatoes.
Did Pa really dig up planted (and no doubt sprouting) potatoes or potato pieces, or were the potatoes eaten the seed potatoes being saved for later planting? What do you think?
