A foot of snow fell. Then the brutal cold came.
It was like something out of Little House on the Prairie.
But I shouldn’t complain. Other than a dusting of snow on Christmas, winter stayed away until 2024. I drive a little red convertible and I was able to drive it all the way until school finished for the holiday break (with the top up, of course). Last year, I didn’t drive it much past Halloween, and not at all after Thanksgiving. This year our temperatures were even moderate enough for me to return to work after lunch without a coat. That rarely happens in the Midwest.
We knew it was coming—the snow and the cold. Like Game of Thrones, when all the characters spoke of “Winter is coming,” and the land will fall into darkness. The dread of impending winter. That isn’t all that far off from the typical Midwestern winter, only some years are worse than others. Nothing felt worse than last winter, until of course this year when a foot of snow fell, and then a few days later, frigid temperatures enveloped a large portion of the country.
As I stared out my window, at the poorly plowed roads that had now turned to solid chunks of white brittle bricks, and pouted at my temporary imprisonment, how in the hell had those prairie people survived?
The sound effects on Little House on the Prairie are giggle-worthy: the lighting strike and thunder (they showed the same clip of said lightning strike every time) and the blizzard wind whirring like a huge fan had been set next to a speaker. All those times Pa had to string a rope between the house and the barn because the whiteout conditions meant one couldn’t see the hand in front of his face. And of course, Miss Beadle’s dire mistake of letting the children go home early before Christmas. We all know how that turned out.
It’s not so much the tragedy that I ponder, but the entrapment. The utmost bored entrapment. What in the world did they do—and better yet, how in the world did they keep warm?
A Winter Storm Warning on a Monday prompted school to cancel. Tuesday the weather was fine—but the roads were not. Tuesday was to be a late start to give everyone time to shovel themselves out of a foot of white crap that had piled up everywhere. Thankfully the winds were not a problem, at least in the city, so no one had to deal with unmanageable drifts only Paul Bunyon would adore. Yet school was cancelled on Tuesday because the street department didn’t have any sense of urgency to plow the roads.
I had been trapped at home since Friday. Friday was a work from home day since Thursday was the last day of the semester. Snow fell off and on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. My husband had to drive me to my doctor’s appointment on Monday. Originally scheduled in the afternoon, the doctor’s office called me to move it to the morning. Monday morning the roads were drivable. Snow had fallen, but the plows kept all emergency snow routes open. The roads by my house were more treacherous, but still doable. Heavy snow fell in the afternoon. The street department’s attitude was one of “We aren’t plowing any side roads until the snow stops falling.” I understand this philosophy when it’s heavy wet snow or when the winds are blowing at fifty miles an hour. But considering this was a three-day snow event, that attitude backfired.
So other than a horrible doctor’s appointment (I had to have two moles removed), I had been trapped inside since Thursday. Come Tuesday afternoon I said screw it. I went shopping on a school snow day.
I barely made it down my street, which still—by noon—had not been plowed. I stayed on the main roads, not taking my usual back streets to avoid traffic. There wasn’t much traffic anyway. I gloriously shopped in empty stores as the weather had kept all the out-of-towners at home.
I could barely last four days before I felt like insanity was pounding at my door. And I’m a homebody. I’m not someone who’s always on the go. I love my alone time. I love my time at home, in the comfort of my pink couch and fuzzy blankets and my Mark Twain Cat in a Ruff picture that makes me giggle. I love reading and writing and avoiding people. Yet four days of wintry weather impeded my independence—like the simple convenience of getting a fountain pop—and annoyed me and stifled me and resulted in a piss-poor attitude of pettiness.
What would the Ingalls family had done for more than double the time? No street department was going to plow them out of their driveway and shovel a path all the way to the Oleson’s Mercantile. Pa’s fiddle would only have been fun for a couple of nights. After that, wouldn’t everyone have told him to take his fiddle and put it where the sun don’t shine?
Caroline, Mary, and Laura could have sewed, but with freezing fingers? And wouldn’t that get tiring, sewing for hours on end? My mother sewed. I had the best Barbie clothes, even Dirty Dancing Barbie clothes because my mom was a better seamstress than Caroline. Yes, I just wrote that and I stand by it. I knew how to pin a pattern, cut it out, and work my grandma’s scary old-fashioned Singer sewing machine. I could cross stitch, although I found it tedious and boring. Just because I could sew didn’t mean it was an activity I chose to do. I would have rather learned the choreography for Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” or pounded out “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the piano (not unlike Nellie).
And the space. Oh my god, the space. Houses now compared to the 1980s are 150 percent bigger, maybe 1500% bigger than the 1880s. We’re not used to small petite little tables and chairs and pink-colored iceboxes. Nowadays, everything must be scaled for the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura, Carrie, (and maybe even Grace…and if Grace is there, then that means Albert could be there too, never mind that Albert didn’t exist in real life.)
At least six people cramped into one room, huddled near the fireplace. I hardly doubt Mary and Laura could have slept upstairs in the loft, or entertained themselves for that matter, so far away from the only source of heat. I break out in hives just thinking about it: I can’t even handle being cramped in a hotel room with my husband and son for more than a couple of hours before demanding to leave or go to sleep for the night.
After the snow fell and the cold came—and it was cold, like freeze-your-nose-hairs cold, the temperature alone reaching -22, with windchills close to -40—I grumbled about having to drive Large Marge rather than my little red Barbie car. Since I rarely drive my old blue SUV anymore, I struggle to adjust to its size, feeling like I’m driving a big old bus as I jostle around in my seat. We took to calling it Large Marge, the semitruck driver from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. I hate driving Large Marge. It takes forever to warm and it isn’t cute at all. Yet I bet the Ingalls would have given anything to trade in their horses and wagon for a four-wheel drive with heat.
It’s easy to say in my current life I would have never made it as a prairie person. I think society in general wouldn’t have made it as prairie people. We lose internet for two hours and we’re ready to declare anarchy or death by boredom. When our Amazon packages are delayed by one day, we fret and pout, needing immediate gratification to exist happily. Remember how Nels only had one stove in stock—the one that Pa wanted to give Caroline, but Laura had already bought after selling Bunny? (For those who have not had the joy of watching Little House on the Prairie, I feel so bad for you. Bunny was Laura’s beloved horse, whom she sold to Nellie. One of the best Little House episodes ever was titled “Bunny.” You must watch it if you haven’t seen it before. Or watch it again if you have. It’s delightful.) Nothing was immediate in those prairie people’s lives, not even death from typhoid or scarlet fever or anthrax. Time seemed to tick at an agonizingly slow rate, except if they had to get the fields planted before they lost their oxen or Mary was studying for a test Caroline had forbidden her to take (cue delightful music).
I attempted to keep some perspective as the cold frosted over my dining room windows, windows I should replace but they look so vintage with their nine separate panes that take up my whole dining room wall. I cannot see out those windows, trapping me even more. I set a floor lamp, one specifically made for light therapy (although I don’t think it’s having any effect on me whatsoever as winter lingers on), directly next to me as I tried to block out the dreary cold. I suffered through a bottle of Coke because it’s too cold to go out and get a fountain Coke. Baby, our Great Pyrenees/Newfoundland mix, pouted since her walks have been indefinitely postponed. We have to call her in from the snow for fear her paws will get frostbit if she spends too much time galloping around the yard, digging her head into snowbanks, her black and white face covered with frozen snow chunks, white crust around her eyes making her look like Michael Myers.
When we dared to venture out, we grumbled when stores and restaurants weren’t open. They closed early. The wind caused drifting; no travel advised outside the city. We’re inconvenienced, and we hate being inconvenienced. Not to mention I loathe winter weather attire, although I do look cute in my black fuzzy hat, and I love wearing my red boots and my pink boots a couple of times a year.
Yet somehow the Ingalls, and at least 50% of the prairie population give or take, survived those brutal winters—they were not fictional characters like the Starks in a fictional land like the Wall on Westeros. Prairie people were real humans who made do with whatever they had, accustomed to trying circumstances. We’ve become wimps who pout when the weather interferes with our plane departure or when our streaming service buffers for even two seconds. Our lives are as easy as they’ve ever been, with robot vacuum cleaners (ours is named Jimmy) to sweep our floors for us, with hands-free driving, with delivery services for everything we can imagine. We can binge-watch our shows without “taping” them every week, we can access almost everything digitally instantly, and best of all, we don’t have to kill our own food.
It’s all about perspective, I suppose. Just imagine the Little House episode when the Ingalls take shelter in a remote cabin on their way home from Mankato, a spring blizzard trapping them for days with a psychotic bounty hunter who wants to kill the Sioux Indian chief that saved Charles’ life. We should remember that the next time a blizzard cancels our connecting flight.