Uncollected Pieces for Young Readers
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[ Snowshoes for Girls ]
Sarah Orne Jewett
THIS is a word to country boys who are lucky enough to have sisters.
I have spent most of my life in n country village and known only too well what an efficient blockade the first snow-storm is. I never enjoy being out of doors so much as I do in late autumn, for all through the November and early December days it is rarely cold or windy enough to make one uncomfortable after a few minutes of quick walking. When even a few inches of snow have fallen I have always had to say good-by to the upland pastures, the tops of the hills, and the sunny hollows and fence-corners where there is comfortable shelter from the northwest wind. Then follows clover-leaf track of a rabbit, and being independent of either roads or the vain and chilling attempt at exercise in sleigh-riding.
I am eager to do all I can to bring back our ancestors' sensible fashion of shoeing themselves in winter, and to see snowshoes in all the farmhouses again, and in the village houses too. It is very easy to learn to use them and there would be so much more visiting from country house to house in winter. I cannot imagine why they ever went out of fashion in New England. In all my drives about the country, I remember seeing only once the track of snowshoes over a high drift of light new-fallen snow.
Now, boys, you boys who have sisters and who can use tools, I beg you to find out for yourselves how to make strong, light snowshoes, and this spring, when the growing wood is full of sap, bend the frames of them and stretch the thongs of them. Find out the right time and the right way to do all this in some book of sports or from some wise old Indian or trapper or Canadian woodsman, and when you go across country next winter take your sister with you. New England girls have spent a great many bright winter days in the house simply because there was snow on the ground outside.
Let us set a new fashion of following a sensible old fashion and be the leaders of a Snowshoe Club. Somebody who knows how to make this curious foot-gear must write to the WIDE AWAKE and tell the rest of us, and by and by we will play at being Indians, and take a new look at our fields and hillsides that will make the blue jays flutter out of their safe quarters in great surprise.
Note
This article appeared in Wide Awake 24:6 (May 1887): 405, in the column "The Contributors and the Children."
Edited and annotated by Terry Heller, Coe College