"The writer of the following letters is a young woman who lost her husband in a railroad accident and went to Denver to seek support for herself and her two-year-old daughter, Jerrine. Turning her hand to the nearest work, she went out by the day as housecleaner and laundress. Later, seeking to better herself, she accepted employment as a housekeeper for a well-to-do Scotch cattleman, Mr. Stewart, who had taken up a quarter-section in Wyoming. The letters, written through several years to a former employer in Denver, tell the story of her new life in the new country."
So begins my edition of "Letters of a Woman Homesteader", with a Publisher's Note dated 1914 (the letters themselves begin in 1909). They also made a movie of the story back in the early 80s or late 70s, called "Heartland".
I mention this book because it's one of my top ten books of all time. Also it's free on Kindle--do a search, if you've never read it and you have a Kindle. Please read it, especially if you are a mamma with babies and feeling overwhelmed.
Those of you who know how much I read will be more impressed by the fact that this book made my top ten--maybe even my top five, I dunno; not being Baba I haven't actually made the physical list--but I pull this book out to read along with The Imitation of Christ and my C.S. Lewis whenever I get into a fit of self-pity. Thomas a Kempis and Lewis are both good about stating the theory of submission and contentment, and Mrs. Stewart shows me the practicality (and quietly rebukes my softness).
Not that Elinore was a devotional writer in any way, although she was a devout Catholic and mentions quite simply the pleasure she takes in praying with her daughter. What she gives me in a refreshing ability to take hard work as a matter of course, and desperately hard work and even tragedy as something that comes into every life. She did a quantity of work in a day that would easily knock me flat--cooking (on a wood cookstove) for a rancher and his hands, managing a garden, milking cows, tending chickens, doing laundry with a wringer and a boiler and a clothesline, making bread, sewing, knitting, mending, chopping kindling, and occasionally putting up something for her poorer neighbors because she had a little time left over. She did all this alone on a homestead with her little girl and her employer, with her nearest female neighbors a long ride away.
It always settles me down to read the story. Firstly Elinore was a good writer, with an ear for dialect and an eye for the stories around her, but it's mostly the unspoken stuff in her work that gets you. If she didn't complain about her situation, all of a sudden it makes my whining about housework--in my two-story, carpeted, electrified, gas-heated house with a front-loading washer and dryer and a dishwasher--seem really, really silly. It's one of the rare books that makes you want to get up and do something for Pete's sake. Even while you're reading it you feel like you ought to be knitting a heel onto a sock or taking a patch in the seat of someone's long underwear.
(Completely parenthetically, I wish I could find some of those old-school red wool union suits for the kiddies, or someththing similar in a wool-silk blend. I saw the red ones once at our ranch supply store but I haven't yet this year. The thing is that they'd be like the footie jammies without the feet, and both Miss Boo and Buddy resent the feet on the footie jammies. I resent two-piece jammies that hitch up in the night and make their little bellies cold and then they wake up and have to be resettled. In the meantime I think I'll just put snaps on the shirts and bottoms of the two-piece cotton jammies...or make two-piece fleece jammies, cotton's not adequate for our needs at the moment. It was all of 6F this morning when we got up.)
In other words, this book is wholesome reading. It's empowering in the sense of leaving one no excuses. If this woman, a widow who's been supporting herself and her toddler doing backbreaking work--because laundry was backbreaking in those days--could face the idea of being essentially alone with strange men on the Wyoming range, and do it cheerfully and well, then I've got no room to fuss about living in the middle of soft-and-easy civilization.
There are some books that I think would be handy to all young mamas. Most of them are how-to sorts of books or books about babies, or cookbooks. This one, though, should be in the library of most women merely for the bracing mental outlook. I think men have more of this type of model, honestly; the best one I can think of off the top of my head being the Stephen Ambrose book Band of Brothers or the (very violent and not for kids) television megaseries of the same name. But both genders need to be able to put their problems in persepective and aspire to courage and cussedness, and both need models, and I think women have an easier time taking as a model someone who had to wash dishes umpteen times a day. We sometimes have this illusion that it would be easier to storm a machine-gun nest somewhere once than it would be to continue with the dishes and a cheerful heart. And perhaps it would be, for some folks; that's why you need a model who is like you. Most of you are are not going to be asked to storm machine-gun nests, after all, but there are a lot of dishes in the world.
So go--dig out the sock needles (admit it, you stopped after an inch of ribbing anyway because you got bored, so just knit and read at the same time and finish the dang thing), download the book on your Kindle (it's free!), set a pan of bread dough to raise or a kettle of beans to bake in the oven, and count your blessings. That's my plan for the cold, snowy day.
Cheers,
Breanna
So begins my edition of "Letters of a Woman Homesteader", with a Publisher's Note dated 1914 (the letters themselves begin in 1909). They also made a movie of the story back in the early 80s or late 70s, called "Heartland".
I mention this book because it's one of my top ten books of all time. Also it's free on Kindle--do a search, if you've never read it and you have a Kindle. Please read it, especially if you are a mamma with babies and feeling overwhelmed.
Those of you who know how much I read will be more impressed by the fact that this book made my top ten--maybe even my top five, I dunno; not being Baba I haven't actually made the physical list--but I pull this book out to read along with The Imitation of Christ and my C.S. Lewis whenever I get into a fit of self-pity. Thomas a Kempis and Lewis are both good about stating the theory of submission and contentment, and Mrs. Stewart shows me the practicality (and quietly rebukes my softness).
Not that Elinore was a devotional writer in any way, although she was a devout Catholic and mentions quite simply the pleasure she takes in praying with her daughter. What she gives me in a refreshing ability to take hard work as a matter of course, and desperately hard work and even tragedy as something that comes into every life. She did a quantity of work in a day that would easily knock me flat--cooking (on a wood cookstove) for a rancher and his hands, managing a garden, milking cows, tending chickens, doing laundry with a wringer and a boiler and a clothesline, making bread, sewing, knitting, mending, chopping kindling, and occasionally putting up something for her poorer neighbors because she had a little time left over. She did all this alone on a homestead with her little girl and her employer, with her nearest female neighbors a long ride away.
It always settles me down to read the story. Firstly Elinore was a good writer, with an ear for dialect and an eye for the stories around her, but it's mostly the unspoken stuff in her work that gets you. If she didn't complain about her situation, all of a sudden it makes my whining about housework--in my two-story, carpeted, electrified, gas-heated house with a front-loading washer and dryer and a dishwasher--seem really, really silly. It's one of the rare books that makes you want to get up and do something for Pete's sake. Even while you're reading it you feel like you ought to be knitting a heel onto a sock or taking a patch in the seat of someone's long underwear.
(Completely parenthetically, I wish I could find some of those old-school red wool union suits for the kiddies, or someththing similar in a wool-silk blend. I saw the red ones once at our ranch supply store but I haven't yet this year. The thing is that they'd be like the footie jammies without the feet, and both Miss Boo and Buddy resent the feet on the footie jammies. I resent two-piece jammies that hitch up in the night and make their little bellies cold and then they wake up and have to be resettled. In the meantime I think I'll just put snaps on the shirts and bottoms of the two-piece cotton jammies...or make two-piece fleece jammies, cotton's not adequate for our needs at the moment. It was all of 6F this morning when we got up.)
In other words, this book is wholesome reading. It's empowering in the sense of leaving one no excuses. If this woman, a widow who's been supporting herself and her toddler doing backbreaking work--because laundry was backbreaking in those days--could face the idea of being essentially alone with strange men on the Wyoming range, and do it cheerfully and well, then I've got no room to fuss about living in the middle of soft-and-easy civilization.
There are some books that I think would be handy to all young mamas. Most of them are how-to sorts of books or books about babies, or cookbooks. This one, though, should be in the library of most women merely for the bracing mental outlook. I think men have more of this type of model, honestly; the best one I can think of off the top of my head being the Stephen Ambrose book Band of Brothers or the (very violent and not for kids) television megaseries of the same name. But both genders need to be able to put their problems in persepective and aspire to courage and cussedness, and both need models, and I think women have an easier time taking as a model someone who had to wash dishes umpteen times a day. We sometimes have this illusion that it would be easier to storm a machine-gun nest somewhere once than it would be to continue with the dishes and a cheerful heart. And perhaps it would be, for some folks; that's why you need a model who is like you. Most of you are are not going to be asked to storm machine-gun nests, after all, but there are a lot of dishes in the world.
So go--dig out the sock needles (admit it, you stopped after an inch of ribbing anyway because you got bored, so just knit and read at the same time and finish the dang thing), download the book on your Kindle (it's free!), set a pan of bread dough to raise or a kettle of beans to bake in the oven, and count your blessings. That's my plan for the cold, snowy day.
Cheers,
Breanna
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