Maybe it’s some kind of lunar phase or solar phenomenon (since everyone I know seems to be in upheaval), maybe it’s my age or something in the water.  I’m certainly at sea, and it turns out that all I really know for sure is what I have known how to do since the beginning…read myself into comfort and some semblance of sanity.

These days that usually looks like a book by or about Louisa May Alcott, irascible and overworked, overwrought and feisty and cranky as can be.  You wouldn’t know it to read Eight Cousins or Rose in Bloom, which are replete with moral lessons even when they show life’s trials (which usually involve things like struggling to be as good as you should be, or contracting a fever which is healed by a cousin’s devoted care).  But I recently had reason to turn back to Little Women…well, more truthfully, I took advantage of my participation in GalleyCat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix Contest (results coming soon!) to revisit it.  And when I took a close look at Chapter 1, I was startled by the sheer restless, anxious energy that spews forth from the book’s first beloved pages.

Just look at the verbs and descriptions:  over the course of a few passages, Jo

• grumbles
• lies on the rug
• states her work makes her “ready to fly out the window or cry”
• laughs
• stretches
• puts her hands in her pockets and whistles
• pulls off her hairnet and shakes down her hair
• warms Marmee’s slippers
• chokes on her tea and drops her bread, butter side down, on the carpet…
• and sings with her sisters.

Could there be a better portrait of the restless energy of a 15-year-old girl too big for her body and outgrowing everything about her life?  Could there be anything more appealing to a modern girl (or struggling, tired, manic, stressed-out woman)?  The beauty, of course, is that some of that anxious spirit comes from Louisa herself.  And just one chapter in, I’m plunged back into one of my primary reasons for persevering:  my admiration of an unconventional “little woman” and of her creator, who had this to say about strife:

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.

There were so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying them.

- Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Shores of Silver Lake

Left to right:  Caroline Celestia “Carrie” Ingalls, Mary Ingalls, Laura Ingalls, late 1870s

- Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Both.

This freckle-faced girl is Lucy Maud Montgomery:  Canadian, teacher, tortured optimist, dutiful preacher’s wife, “passionate friend,” and author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables series.

We’re hanging out for the next week as I plunge into the writing process, on which Maud had this to say:

For five months I got up at six o’clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my “stunt” for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school.

When people say to me, as they occasionally do, ‘Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do’, I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.