- HarperCollins
- A misleadingly cheerful cover for a very grim book
The one great thing about the sort of bone-crushing cold we had earlier this week is that it gives you serious bragging rights. People in New York are complaining that it’s a piddling three degrees? Pffffft. We had 15 below! Now that it’s gotten up to freezing, doesn’t it make you feel like a better, stronger person to be able to say that you lived in a city where it got to be 15 below and you went outside (even if it was only for a minute to toss boiling water or learn how it feels when your nose hairs freeze, it still counts) and lived to tell about it?
I thought about how, in The Long Winter, all the schoolchildren of the town try to walk home in a blizzard so awful they can barely see—only Laura’s fortunately timed crash into a building insures that everyone gets back to town instead of wandering off onto the prairie. Safely home, “Laura sat stiffly down. She felt numb and stupid. She rubbed her eyes and saw a pink smear on her hand. Her eyelids were bleeding where the snow had scratched them.”
- Garth Williams
- Cattle with their heads frozen to the ground
Later, when I took my dog out, I thought about the scene in These Happy Golden Years when the condensed breath of Almanzo’s horses forms icicles hanging off their noses, and the poor cattle in The Long Winter who end up with their entire heads frozen.
