Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

Given the recent chill and threats of snow, I decided to revisit “Sex and the North Wind,” one of the blog’s most popular posts. If you haven’t read it yet, I hope you will. And if you liked it a year ago, you might like to read it again. New post coming soon.

Lately, Alice has been forcing herself to read books that feature devout Christian women trapped on remote homesteads during Dakota blizzards in the 1800s. Frost thick as cake icing covers every window. A handsome but forbidden male stumbles in from somewhere, shakes the snow off his boots and settles in. The North wind blasts through chinks in the walls in search of a meager fire to startle into wild, flaring activity and then abandon, leaving behind a heap of flickering embers.

Any reasonable character in such circumstances would go mad with cold and dread of more cold, but these women are easily distracted by envy, greed, lust (usually) and other sins that require an explanatory prayer every ten or so pages (as if the Lord may have lost track of the plot). A typical prayer goes something like this:

“With my husband Randolph away to find work in Bismarck because our farm is failing, Lord, please help me resist the yearning to fall into our hired hand Jake’s strong arms. Help me to remember that the threshing accident that so tragically scarred Randolph’s once attractive countenance, making it almost unbearable for me to look at him ever again, wasn’t his fault and is as nothing compared to the bitterness that has soured his soul and caused him to withhold his love from me and our baby, Solomon, who is the chief joy of my life. I know my duty is to reach out to Randolph when he returns from nearby Bismarck. Even though Jake is a good-looking man and seems kind as well as unbelievably muscular, I must not surrender to him, no matter how close we have become this past week, shut in together in this house, thrust into intimate proximity by weather that tests spirit and heart and, yes, body. Without your guidance, I am only human…etc.”

That last phrase is the reason these novels get written in the first place. Dig through all that snow and ice and underneath you still find only humans, an adaptable but needy and highly talkative sort of animal prone to getting into scrapes requiring moral decisions that any self-respecting snake, for example, would simply ignore. Snakes don’t drag religion into things, and they have the sense to hide out during blizzards. Who knows where? Woodpiles? Under porches? In the hayloft? Or:

Don’t think any more about where the snakes might be hiding. I’m sorry I brought them up. They’re not in these novels anyway, except metaphorically as the cold and calculating lure of sin.

“I’m freezing!” Alice told me yesterday as she put down her book when I came for a visit.

This may have been her way of saying that she doesn’t like these books and wishes I would have read the plot descriptions more carefully before committing her to this reading. Alice will not pick up a book and begin to read it without finishing it, no matter how bad the book. I guess in your ninth decade you can’t tell yourself that life is too short to fool around. On the contrary, life has been long, and if she has four Christian blizzard books in her possession, which she does, thanks to my rushed trip through the library’s large print section last week, she will read all four. I had no idea there’d be blizzards and prayers in each and every one. I thought they were pioneer stories about salt of the earth people who could have been her ancestors.

“These people pray too long and too often,” she told me, patting the book. “If they’d really carried on that way they’d never have gotten any work done.” Then she turned on the new TV set Meg and I had found for her over the weekend. It’s bigger and has a better picture than the one that broke last week after a very short (three-year) life span.

She found the weather channel and pointed out where it’s still snowing, or where temperatures still refuse to behave like spring. Here, for example, is her old hometown, Bismarck:

That gave her an idea. She brought out an old photo album with a picture of me, age five, standing outside in heaps of snow in North Dakota on a May afternoon.

Little Andrea shoveling snow in May.

“See what it’s like?” she said, as if I hadn’t lived through it.

She changed the subject to Libby, who had snatched a glass sugar container from one of the tables in the dining room, wrapped it in a paper napkin, and presented it to Alice as a gift.

“That woman,” she said, shaking her head.

But she couldn’t keep her eyes from the TV set.

Just as I became as absorbed as I could manage in watching weather activity around the United States of America, I heard Alice say that the meat had thawed.

I looked over at her small kitchen, which has a refrigerator but no freezer. “What do you mean? What meat? How’d that happen?”

“Well, there was no power, of course,” she said impatiently.

This was news. No power at The Place. That normally would have been the topic she mentioned first. Was that why she said she was freezing? Maybe the power had just come back on right before my arrival. After all, the day had been chilly. “When did you lose power?” I asked.

She frowned at me. “During the blizzard!!”

Now the room came fully into focus. “Which one?”

“That one in Iowa that I was talking about. I guess you weren’t listening.”

“I was watching the weather.”

“I’m talking about a bad blizzard,” she said. I skittered backwards mentally, trying to find any mention of an Iowa blizzard before talk of thawed meat.

Nothing.

“It lasted eight days,” she said.

I decided not to worry about her. She thought she’d delivered a preamble out loud that she’d told only herself. This sort of thing hardly ever happens with her, for which I am so grateful.

“That’s a long time without power,” I said.

“The power wasn’t off for eight whole days. Only part of the time. Maybe a day.”

“Thank goodness,” I said.

“Oh, that was a terrible blizzard.”

We had just turned our attention back to the weather channel to search for signs of spring when a ray of sun so bright it made us blink came charging through the window and threw itself wantonly across the floor. It soon faded, but for a moment winter seemed as long ago and far away as homestead days.

The North Wind Doth Blow…

The North Wind doth blow
And we shall have snow,
And what will the robin do then?
Poor thing!

He will sit in a barn,
And to keep himself warm,
Will hide his head under his wing.
Poor thing!

-Mother Goose

Visit Nick Butterworth’s site, or read about him here.

I love the new McElderry Book of Mother Goose, illustrated by my good friend and favorite children’s book illustrator and author, Petra Mathers. If you have small children or grandchildren, this is a great birthday present.

Do you have a favorite nursery rhyme?