Free The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure

technique for coloring the butter until I knew if this wacky churning business would even work. I mean, I had no idea how hard it would be to churn butter. I’d always had the sense from the Big Woods passage that it was a real slog. In the book the dash was heavy; Ma “churned for a long time”; sometimes Mary churned “while Ma rested.” Ma had to rest ? “Rest” as in “give her arms a break,” I wondered, or “lie back for a spell on the trundle bed?”
    Farmer Boy , which also had a churning scene, wasn’t any more helpful. Apparently the Wilders needed to churn butter twice a week in summer when the cows were producing the most milk. “Mother and the girls were tired of churning, and on rainy days Almanzo had to do it.” Had to! Even though the illustration shows a decidedly more fun-looking barrel-style churn mounted on rockers, churning still sounded tedious. “Almanzo had to [ had to!] keep rocking the churn till the chugging broke the cream . . .” For how long? Hours? I couldn’t wait to find out. I was prepared to churn until my hands blistered.
    â€œEach day had its own proper work,” it says in Little House in the Big Woods, and according to the book, churning was done on Thursday, which of course made it sound like you needed, you know, the whole day. So I picked a Monday when I didn’t have any plans at all. It was one of those crazy February presidents’ holidays that my office took off from work but Chris’s office didn’t.
    â€œHave a good day off,” he said, as I poured him some coffee to take in the car.
    â€œIt’s not a day off,” I told him. “I have to churn butter!”
    When I finally had the cream ready to go in the crock (it had to sit for an hour or so to warm up a bit), I slid the churn across the floor into our TV room so I could sit on the couch and churn.
    I figured that the only way I could get through a long spate of churnin’ was to do it while watching TV. It did feel a little bit like cheating—after all, Ma didn’t have any outside entertainment while she churned, and you can only sing “The Blue Juniata” to yourself so many times. (Maybe she had other songs. I hoped for her sake that she did.) As a compromise, I decided I would watch an episode of Little House on the Prairie that I’d recorded. It was the one where Laura impulsively swipes a pretty music box belonging to Nellie Oleson, who finds out about the theft and blackmails her into doing her bidding. This better be good, I thought, and I didn’t just mean the TV show.
    The wooden dash had felt awfully light when I’d first gotten the churn, but it felt a lot more substantial now that there was cream in the churn—it worked with a buoyant, natural motion, and I quickly got used to pushing it up and down, gently rotating the dash as I went.

    It didn’t take long for things to start happening. After just a few minutes the splashing sound stopped, replaced by an eerie silence. No—a very faint squishing when I moved the dash around. What was that? I picked up the lid and peered inside. At this moment it seemed things had taken a horrible turn, both on TV and in my living room: Little Half-Pint had accidentally broken Nellie’s music box, and I had made a bucketful of dessert topping.
    I knew I was working with whipping cream, but I hadn’t expected to see it whip. When you see that much whipped cream at once, the sight becomes a lot less delightful somehow. And a lot more perverted.
    But I put the lid back on, took a deep breath, and kept churning. Maybe another ten minutes or so, by which time Nellie had discovered Laura with the music box. “You know stealing is against the law?” Nellie said, sneering. “You’re lucky I like you.” Then the sound inside the crock changed again. Back, somehow, to splashing.
    This time when I looked, the cream was