Cornucopia

The sun is shining with all its end-of-February might, making prisms in the snow crust. The Sudbury river sparkles as it flows by, ice-free. Also, I have several windows open a crack. I wish, though, I had with me my mother's copy of Here I Stay by Elizabeth Coatsworth, for reading it again would rebuke any lingering sense of cabin fever.

Here I Stay is a novel about a real event  -- "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death".  In 1816 several climate abnormalities caused the global temperature to drop a little (0.7 - 1.3 F). It truly doesn't take much to cause severe consequences, for 1816 also became known as the Year Without a Summer, or the Poverty Year.

There were major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. In the Coatsworth novel, the focus is on Maine where European settlers were just getting settled on farms. A series of volcanic eruptions across the globe, notably Mount  Tambora in 1815, veiled the sun's light to a degree that crops just couldn't grow. Settlers left Maine in droves, drawn to Ohio by travelers' tales of deep loam and farming without vicissitudes.

According to Wikipedia, historian John D. Post has called this "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world".

Coatsworth's young heroine stays on in her deserted Maine farming community to till the land her just-deceased father had labored over and loved. Her lonely year is marked by plenty of vicissitudes faced and overcome. It is also ameliorated by the beauty of natural events and some timely contacts with other humans, such as colorful visits from passing traders and native Americans.

In my family, this book became a major rite of passage into womanhood.  It's not just the happy ending in the prospect of a happy marriage. It's more the heroine's growing strength, her ingenuity, courage, and refinement of character.