The Long Fucking Winter (satire)

December 18, 2020 11:32 AM

(Excerpts from Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Fucking Winter by Sharon Goldman in McSweeney's.) Morning was bright and clear but there was no school. There would be no more in-person classes until COVID-19 cases went down again. Carrie gazed out the window while she wiped the breakfast dishes, and drearily Laura sloshed the cooling water in the dishpan. “I want to go somewhere!” Carrie said fretfully. “I’m tired of staying in this old kitchen!” “We were thankful enough for this warm kitchen yesterday,” Mary gently reminded her. “At least we aren’t superspreaders like Mr. and Mrs. Boast, who had the whole family over for Thanksgiving and gave each guest a ball of butter from their last churning. At least five people were infected.”

Laura felt cross. The kitchen seemed stale and dull. “This winter is going to be so fucking long,” she said. “Laura,” Ma said reproachfully. “You all may put on your wraps and go out into the yard for a breath of fresh air.” She paused, then added, “But don’t forget your fucking masks.”

posted by Bella Donna (23 comments total)

As someone who read all the Little House books when I was a child...I laughed.

(Scary, I actually remembered the bit where Laura twisted hay into sticks because they'd run out of wood.)
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:38 AM on December 18, 2020 [20 favorites]

Having read The Long Winter with my daughter when she was young, this is excellent. What I wish Laura had written. That damn book never seemed to end.
posted by blob at 11:41 AM on December 18, 2020

Hmmm, doesn't quite work for me; as a fan of the books, swearing, and name-dropping, I think it would have been funnier without the last two.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:45 AM on December 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

The fabulous Anne Helen Petersen has written about The Long Winter and the pandemic here.

(As someone who grew up reading the Little House books I adore this.)
posted by kalimac at 11:45 AM on December 18, 2020 [7 favorites]

I liked the inspirational ending. Lord knows I needed one. :-)
posted by Bella Donna at 11:51 AM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Funny, but Pa would have been the most virulent anti-masker ever, and then he'd uproot the family and make them move to a place without any people at all.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:58 AM on December 18, 2020 [73 favorites]

I liked the idea of this, and it made me laugh, but yeah, I agree with betweenthebars.
posted by JanetLand at 11:59 AM on December 18, 2020

Having re-read the entire series earlier this year, I heartily approve this parody.

When it really started to get cold, and I realized how nice it was to wear a mask out in the winter weather, it made me think of how the girls in the books used to wear veils over their faces in the worst of the snow. I think it was mostly Almanzo’s sisters, but still.

With the added fucks, now is probably the time to reminisce about how the classroom copy of Little House on the Prairie at my Baptist primary school had a number of words blacked out. I had never seen anything like it before (our parents had never made any attempt to restrict or censor our reading) so I asked my mother about it. She told me to compare it to the copy we had at home. I didn’t dare take it to school, so I memorized one of the passages with blacked-out words, came home, and checked it against ours. It was some faux-fanity word like “drat” or “blast.” So, to anyone who feels like “fuck” is a bridge too far for such wholesome material, take comfort in the fact that there are people out there who think the original text is a bridge too far for such wholesome material.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:18 PM on December 18, 2020 [22 favorites]

When it really started to get cold, and I realized how nice it was to wear a mask out in the winter weather...

Someone doesn't wear glasses.
posted by jeremias at 12:26 PM on December 18, 2020 [28 favorites]

When it really started to get cold, and I realized how nice it was to wear a mask out in the winter weather...

Someone doesn't wear glasses.

Oh, I do, but they fog over in the winter with or without a mask. Since I have to cope with reduced vision either way, I tend to leave them off when I’m out in the worst weather for any length of time.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:31 PM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

I have often thought of The Long Winter during this pandemic; I read it obsessively as a kid, and then Farmer Boy as an antidote because of all the feasting. (Including the hot potato which blows up in his eye, which has made me scared of baked potatoes since.)

Sadly I can't share this insight with my kids because I gave up trying to edit out the racism and kind of realized I didn't want to romanticize Pa Ingalls' quest, etc. etc. So it's been funny to realize that mentally it's still a go-to series.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:37 PM on December 18, 2020 [9 favorites]

Oh, betweenthebars is 100% right, but also I want to note that the Boasts being superspreaders is perfect as well.

I hope this whole parody makes Rose Wilder Lane choke in the afterlife, actually.
posted by kalimac at 12:54 PM on December 18, 2020 [12 favorites]

I thought it was a spot on parody! I forwarded this to my sister and my spouse sent it to a coworker. They’re both big Laura fans who would appreciate the humor.

But our friend who not only did her master’s thesis on Laura Ingalls Wilder but also normally goes to several Laura conferences a year and gives in-costume presentations as Laura all around the state? Yeah, she might not see the humor.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 1:08 PM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Never a big Laura fan, but I chuckled.
Weirdly, before reading this, this morning I suddenly realized that I was raised in a family where there was never a vulgarity* spoken. Actually families, since my parents divorced when I was born, and I was to some extent raised by my grandparents. I never heard a swearword or a fart joke till at about fifth grade, and it confused me when it happened. My eldest daughter is probably somewhat the same, because how does one start when one never learnt it?
I have to work on this.

* we did learn everything about our sexy parts and how they worked from before I even remember. It wasn't a Christian or moral thing, it was a manners thing.
posted by mumimor at 1:43 PM on December 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

Having read about the true, unromanticized version of Charles Ingalls, I very much agree with betweenthebars et al. that Pa would have absolutely been an anti-masker. He would have been a big participant in apocalyptic prepper and conspiracy theorist forums, also.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:55 PM on December 18, 2020 [9 favorites]

I never read the books growing up. I think I read one to my kid and stopped because it all seemed like too much work. My grandparents picked crops; reading about wholesome struggles to survive was never an escape for me even as a small-town lass.
posted by Bella Donna at 2:01 PM on December 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

Reading Little Women this year, this passage gave me some real "second month of lockdown" vibes:

For a week the amount of virtue in the old house would have supplied the neighborhood. It was really amazing, for everyone seemed in a heavenly frame of mind, and self-denial was all the fashion. Relieved of their first anxiety about their father, the girls insensibly relaxed their praiseworthy efforts a little, and began to fall back into old ways. They did not forget their motto, but hoping and keeping busy seemed to grow easier, and after such tremendous exertions, they felt that Endeavor deserved a holiday, and gave it a good many.

Jo caught a bad cold through neglect to cover the shorn head enough, and was ordered to stay at home till she was better, for Aunt March didn't like to hear people read with colds in their heads. Jo liked this, and after an energetic rummage from garret to cellar, subsided on the sofa to nurse her cold with arsenicum and books. Amy found that housework and art did not go well together, and returned to her mud pies. Meg went daily to her pupils, and sewed, or thought she did, at home, but much time was spent in writing long letters to her mother, or reading the Washington dispatches over and over. Beth kept on, with only slight relapses into idleness or grieving.

posted by mbrubeck at 3:22 PM on December 18, 2020 [5 favorites]

Loved the books as a kid in MN and I looooved this take on them.

I often think of scenes from The Long Winter, and I like imagining Pa standing in the stables, checking the beasts, and dropping an F-Bomb about the cold.
posted by wenestvedt at 4:41 PM on December 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Where is the part about the muskrat den having the thickest walls Pa had ever seen?
posted by batter_my_heart at 10:06 PM on December 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

A reboot of the TV series is in the works at Paramount.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:12 PM on December 19, 2020

Yes, Pa would have been an anti-masker, or at the very least, Ma would have made Laura wear the red mask and Mary wear the blue mask because of the color of their hair. And maybe if the horses had masks, Manly wouldn't have had to keep stopping the cutter to warm up their frozen faces!

The bit about traveling all over the place to find flour, though, that's still legit.
posted by basalganglia at 1:27 PM on December 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

I at first hopped on the bandwagon and agreed that Pa would've been an antimasker, but then I remembered him breaking into that dude's house or store, whatever it was, and knocking out the knothole in the false wall where dude was hiding seedwheat so he, Pa, could get the seedwheat out so half pint et al. wouldn't starve--and Pa let in all the other townspeople to also get seedwheat so they and their families wouldn't starve. So he seems to've had some community spirit along with his constant need to get away from all people other than his wife and children because he couldn't stand the sound of another man's axe for some reason. Axes must've been the leafblowers of their day.

He was also obsessed with "Progress!" He was into that thresher that time.

There was also the time Laura was supersick with something or other and about to die but got treatment from an African doctor and lived.

So Pa possibly into medical as well as agricultural technology and not a wild-eyed plandemic type.

I'm talking fictional Pa, that is. We're not dealing with Papabear real life Pa or Mamabear Michael Landon insipid Pa, here. I do not believe that perfect Babybear Little House Pa as depicted by Garth Williams would've shunned facemasks for his family in a pandemic.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:44 AM on December 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

That's an interesting point, Don Pepino, comparing the two different versions of Pa: the real Charles Ingalls and Charles Ingalls in the books. I am trying to find the article I read about the "real" Pa but am now unable to find it...did I dream it??
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:35 PM on December 21, 2020