In These Happy Golden Years, things take rather a romantic turn. In the opening scene, Pa is driving Laura to the small town of Brewster to begin her first term teaching school. It’s come up so quickly that Laura hasn’t had a chance to take Almanzo up on his offer, at the end of Little Town on the Prairie, to go sleigh riding. Sigh.
But Almanzo surprises her on her first Friday afternoon in Brewster—and what a week it’s been. She’s terrified of teaching school and even more terrified of the family she’s boarding with. But Almanzo carries her home in his sleigh every Friday and back every Sunday, for the whole term. Finally, after months of sleighing and buggy rides, Laura gets a ring and Almanzo says he will build her a little house by his tree claim next summer. In the meantime, she has one more term of school to teach, and as he brings her to her new village, she sings:
The stars are rolling in the sky,
The earth rolls on below,
And we can feel the rattling wheel
Revolving as we go;
Then tread away my gallant boys,
And make the axle fly!
Why should not wheels go round-about,
Like planets in the sky?Almanzo laughed aloud. “Your songs are like your father’s! They always fit.”
Except for one thing, of course—his wheels would never rattle.
Does it really take until practically the end of the series for someone to make a comment about the fittingness of Pa’s singing? I think so, explicitly at least.
The songs, which anyone who has read these books must remember, as they are everywhere, have undergone some changes since the early years. In The Long Winter, the unthinkable happened:
[E]very note from the fidle was a very little wrong. Pa’s fingers were clumsy. The music dragged and a fiddle string snapped.
“My fingers are too stiff and thick from being out in the cold so much, I can’t play,” Pa spoke as if he were ashamed. He laid the fiddle in its box. “Put it away, Laura, until some other time.”
…
Laura listened to the winds while she stared at the blank window without seeing it. The worst thing that had happened was that Pa could not play the fiddle. If she had not asked him to play it, he might not have known that he could not do it.
But his abilities came back, and he continues putting them to good use. He’s been teaching them how to dance since they’ve been at Silver Lake, and the first song he sings at home in These Happy Golden Years, which gives the book its name, is bittersweet:
Golden years are passing by,
Happy, happy golden years,
Passing on the wings of time,
These happy golden years.
Call them back as they go by,
Sweet their memories are,
Oh, improve them as they fly,
These happy golden years.Laura’s heart ached as the music floated away and was gone in the spring night under the stars.
Pa’s songs have always fit, but now that Laura is getting older and her own conception of her family is becoming bittersweet—she’s about to leave them, and everything is changing—she appreciates more of the emotion behind them.
Here’s one Pa sings to Ma when no one is around, just before Laura walks in to announce her engagement:
A beautiful castle I’ve built for thee
In dreamland far away,
And there, gentle darling, come dwell with me,
Where love alone has sway.
Oh, sweet will be our blisses,
Oh, rare will be our blisses!
We’ll tell our time by the lovers’ chime
That strikes the hour with kisses.
Now this must be too fitting. This is what happens when I read now, suspicious of the machinery of literature. Can Pa really have been singing this just as Laura and Almanzo are having their first kiss? Laura is making the songs fit even better. One of her great inheritances.
Recent Comments