Saturday Feb. 7, 2015

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Old Roses

White roses, tiny and old, flare among thorns
by the barn door.
                                For a hundred years
under the June elm, under the gaze
of seven generations,
                                        they lived briefly
like this, in the month of roses,
                                                          by the fields
stout with corn, or with clover and timothy
making thick hay,
                                  grown over, now,
with milkweed, sumac, paintbrush.
                                                               Old
roses survive
winter drifts, the melt in April, August
parch,
             and men and women
who sniffed roses in spring and called them pretty
as we call them now,
                                       walking beside the barn
on a day that perishes.

“Old Roses” by Donald Hall, from White Apples and the Taste of Stone. © Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Reprinted with permission of the author.   (buy now)

It’s the birthday of inventor John Deere, born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1804. He was a blacksmith by training and by trade. Business conditions weren’t very good in Vermont, so in 1836, Deere decided to move out West to Illinois. There, he found that the traditional wood and iron plows used back East were no match for the farms out West. While New England soil was light and sandy, the prairie sod was heavy and thick. Farmers had to stop frequently to clean soil and clay off of their plow blades. Deere had the idea that a properly shaped blade would scour itself as it went along. He experimented with some new designs, and by 1838 he’d sold three of them to local farmers. He sold 10 the following year, and 40 the year after that. By 1841, he was making and selling a hundred plows a year. Deere’s innovation became known as “The Plow that Broke the Plains.”

It’s the birthday of Charles Dickens (books by this author), born in Portsmouth, England (1812), who had a relatively happy childhood until his father’s debts sent the Dickens family into poverty. At the age of 12, Charles was pulled out of school and had to work in a factory pasting the labels onto containers of shoe polish, while his younger siblings lived with his parents in debtors’ prison. In some of his most famous novels, Oliver Twist (1837-38), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), and A Christmas Carol (1843), he revealed the plight of England’s poor. After he became one of the most famous men in England, Dickens used his wealth and influence to convince the upper classes to give to the poor. He was also opposed to capital punishment and worked internationally for prison reform, helped set up a halfway house for former prostitutes, and promoted public education and better sanitation systems throughout England.

It’s the birthday of novelist (Harry) Sinclair Lewis (books by this author), born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota (1885). He felt stifled by Sauk Centre and once tried to run away to fight in the Spanish-American War when he was 13. He escaped to the East Coast for college at Yale University, and during school vacations he would smuggle himself onto cattle ships heading for England. As a young man, he tried to get a job working on the Panama Canal, and he traveled across 40 states in the U.S. working as a journalist. Though he spent time in 14 countries in Europe and traveled through Venezuela, Colombia, and Russia, the majority of his books are set in small-town Midwestern America. His first success was his novel Main Street (1920), about a rebellious woman named Carol Kennicott, who is ostracized by the citizens of the fictional small town of Gopher Prairie.

He went on to write many other books, including Babbitt (1922) and Arrowsmith (1925). In 1930, he became the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

It’s the birthday of lexicographer Sir James Murray, born in Denholm, Scotland (1837). He was the president of the Philological Society in London, and in 1879 he became the editor of a 10-year project called the New English Dictionary (later known as the Oxford Dictionary). When he died in 1915, more than 30 years after he started work on it, Murray had compiled roughly half of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.

It’s the birthday of writer Laura Ingalls Wilder (books by this author), born near Pepin, Wisconsin (1867). She grew up with three sisters in a pioneer family. Her father was a restless man, and every couple of years he packed the family into their covered wagon and moved on in search of a better place. During her childhood, she lived in a series of shacks, cabins, and sod houses in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, and South Dakota. She began teaching when she was 15 years old; she didn’t like being a teacher but she needed to help support her family. Three years later, she married the most eligible bachelor farmer in town, and they had a daughter, named Rose. They eventually settled in the Ozarks in Missouri, where Wilder lived for the remainder of her life.

They lived a hard life of manual labor on their Missouri farm, which included chickens, a dairy, and an apple orchard. Their daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, left as soon as she could and became a journalist in San Francisco. Lane traveled all over the world and became one of the highest-earning women writers in America, publishing everything from romantic serials to ghostwritten celebrity memoirs. She sent her parents $500 a year, which they grudgingly accepted, although they put most of it in savings and continued to live a similar lifestyle. When she built them a beautiful new stone cottage on their farm, they were skeptical, and when she bought them a car, her father ran it into a tree.

Laura Ingalls Wilder had begun writing under the name Mrs. A.J. Wilder for the Missouri Ruralist and the St. Louis Star Farmer, articles like “Economy in Egg Production,” “Spic, Span and Beauty,” “Just a Question of Tact,” and “Making the Best of Things.” When the stock market crashed, Rose lost all her money, and the Wilders lost their savings too, since they had followed their daughter’s advice and invested with her broker. Suddenly, the income from Wilder’s writing became even more important. At the age of 63, she decided to try writing an autobiography. She wrote by hand with a pencil. And by the time she was finished, she had filled six lined tablets with her story, which she called Pioneer Girl.

Wilder gave the rough draft of her manuscript to Lane, who helped her edit it and send it to an agent. The agent disliked it; he wrote: “It didn’t seem to have enough high points or crescendo. A fine old lady was sitting in a rocking chair and telling a story chronologically but with no benefit of perspective or theater.” Both Wilder and Lane were determined to see the manuscript succeed — besides needing the money for retirement, Wilder had her heart set on publishing a book. The two women revised the first part of the manuscript into a children’s book, and Lane used her contacts to get it into the hands of Virginia Kirkus, a children’s book editor at Harper & Brothers. Kirkus read the manuscript on the train ride home to Connecticut from New York, and she was so fascinated by the story that she missed her stop. She bought it and offered Wilder a three-book contract. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and its sequel Farmer Boy (1933), about the boyhood of Wilder’s husband, Almanzo, were a big success even though book selling was slow during the Depression. Wilder continued to write books about her childhood, drawing on her own memories and those of her relatives. She earned enough to be financially comfortable for the rest of her life.

Her books include Little House on the Prairie (1935), On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), and These Happy Golden Years (1943).

She said: “It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our everyday duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome.”

Little House in the Big Woods ends: “She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®