Choose the Positive

from Little House on the Prairie

Pa has just had a conversation with Mr. Edwards and Mr. Scott about the soldiers coming out to force the homesteaders to move because they supposedly are 6 miles within Indian Territory.  Pa quickly decides to move his family on his own accord, rather than waiting it out to be physically escorted off the land.

After a feast of potatoes for supper because "We've been going without potatoes, saving them for seed.  Now we'll eat 'em up!" 

Everyone was quiet that night.  Even Jack felt that something was wrong, and he lay down close to Laura when she went to bed.

It was now too warm for a fire, but Pa and Ma sat looking at the ashes in the fireplace.

Ma sighed gently and said, "A whole year gone, Charles."  But Pa answered, cheerfully:  "What's a year amount to?  We have all the time there is." 



Pa and Ma and the 3 girls (and Jack, the dog) are now traveling to Independence to set up a new homestead.  Ma was disappointed about the sudden move, and the abandonment of their house with real glass windows, and the fields that Pa had worked so diligently on, and the plow that he had just traded furs to acquire.

They set up camp, chained the livestock to the feed-box at the end of the wagon and fed everybody their supper.  The girls are tucked into their beds, and Ma sits down by the fire alongside Pa who begins to play his fiddle.  Pa stopped singing "Oh, Susanna, don't you cry for me," to comment "Do you know, Caroline, I've been thinking what fun the rabbits will have, eating that garden we planted."

"Don't, Charles," Ma said.

"Never mind, Caroline!" Pa told her.  "We'll make a better garden.  Anyways, we're taking more out of Indian Territory than we took in."

"I don't know what," Ma said, and Pa answered, "Why, there's the mule!"  Then Ma laughed, and Pa and the fiddle sang again.



That's the kind of attitude I want to have.  Although undesirable things happen to all of us, can we focus on the good in the situation, rather than wallowing in the bad?  Can we even say that it is 'bad'?  It might just be the thing that moves us, motivates us, propels us toward something we would not normally choose but might be a true blessing in disguise.

Because of them or in spite of them I am not sure.  Does it matter?