My niece has been enjoying The Little House on the Prairie, which she charmingly calls “Little Prairie on the House.” She just turned five, and I am reading the series aloud to her. Although I watched the 80’s TV episodes with a frontier settler’s dedication as a kid, I had never read the books before. Have you read this horror series? I am halfway through the book, and the tender-hearted Ingalls family have almost drowned in a creek, been surrounded by voracious wolves, and scarcely survived malaria.
But that’s not all … Wait! There’s more! Pa Ingalls nearly suffocated in a carbon monoxide cloud when he was digging the family water well. Then the chimney caught on fire while Pa was in town, so that Ma had to put out the blaze herself before it destroyed the roof that Pa had just built … from trees he had cut down himself. Ma extinguished the inferno by beating it back with a stick. A stick. And she didn’t so much as get the hem of her dress singed. All this before they planted a cornfield.
Eleven books come after this one in the series. I don’t think I can take it.
In one scene, Ma cooks cornbread for and offers tobacco to Indians who suddenly walked through the front door, unannounced, and sat down at the table in the Little House, demanding dinner. Tell me, if complete strangers bounded through our front doors and pulled up chairs in our homes, who among us would not call 911 and grab a butcher knife? Who?? Ma was scared out of her wits herself, she said so. But remember, this is the woman who battled a fireball with a bit of tree. So dealing with frightening intruders was all in a day’s work. She served a hearty meal and never gave off a whiff of fear. She even lit their pipes for an after dinner smoke. Ma Ingalls passes muster.
Ma never fights with Pa, ever, and I am asking myself why. Two possibilities: Either she is too busy tending to life and death matters to worry about quarrels that don’t matter in the long run, or she realizes that all they have is each other. Pa is the guy who hauls the water and hunts the prairie hens for dinner. Without him, she is a goner.
Maybe I do not have enough manual labor to do. I find myself wandering into quarrels that don’t matter, as if they were cornfields, high and heady, too grain-rich to see through. And once I’m in, I can’t find my way out, even though I realize that there are life and death matters, and the squabble in question isn’t one of them. Even though I realize that all we ever have is each other.
Lately, when I want a path out of the maze of maize, I’ll ask if anyone wants popcorn, because it is almost impossible to stay angry if I do. Try it. You will smile, whether you feel like it or not.
I’m serious. If I catch myself putting my own stubborn principles before the people I love, I suggest popcorn. Suddenly and literally. No friend has ever been upset that I did. It relieves every pressure. I could almost call it “stopcorn,” because it halts the discomfort for just a second. It is a way of saying, “Let’s drop this worrisome thing we’re doing; it’s not worth it.” This week I used the trusty phrase again, in fact. Lo and behold, by abandoning my self-defensive, hurt stance long enough to mention popcorn, I discovered that the frustration hadn’t been worth the fuel I’d been adding to my mental fire. Somebody needed to beat back the blaze with a branch, and that someone was me. Whew, I am quite glad we abandoned the disagreement.
At times, my self-protective thoughts are wild with an Apache’s fury. When I’m wielding words like tomahawks, I can scalp ’em if I want to. But really, I don’t want to. I don’t want to be right. I want to be in relationships. I would never trade the latter for the former. Strong women like me have got to learn to drop it, every now and then. The key for all of us is to realize that if we were on a prairie, hewing out our every day’s room and board with blistered hands, then maintaining the emotional topic at hand would not be worth the effort.
Remember: if it is not life or death, it probably won’t matter in the long run.
Remember: we are all we have.
Which is one way of saying that most of what we fight about is … well, corny.