Louisa Alcott and the Mood Pillow
Needs lots of rewriting, but good story about sibling conflict.
Some of you may have read a book called Little Women. It's a book about the March family: the four girls, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, Mr. March, and Marmee as they called their mother.
This book was written by a Unitarian author named Louisa May Alcott. She lived not so very long ago, in a town not very far from here called Concord. Many things that happen in the book Little Women are very much like things that happened in real life to Louisa Alcott. Not everything, but many things!
For example, Jo, the heroine of the book, is very much like Louisa Alcott herself. Both of them had long, chestnut-colored hair, and both were tall tomboys. And both Jo and Louisa had terrible tempers, which is another way of saying that they had a hard time controlling their anger. One of my favorite parts of the book tells how Jo March figured out a way to keep her temper under control. And this is the part about Jo's "mood pillow."
The house that the March family lived in was a big, old, rambling New England farmhouse. Jo thought the best room in the house was the garret — this was a room up in the attic with a nice, sunny window, and next to the window sat an old sofa.
The sofa was long, and broad, and low — it was the perfect thing for the girls to play on when they were little. They had slept on it, ridden on the arms as if they were horses, crawled under it pretending they were animals. As they got older, they had long, serious talks sitting on it, dreamed daydreams on it — and Jo liked to curl up in its corner with a good book, and half a dozen russet apples — and as she sat reading, a tame little rat would stick its head out and enjoy her quiet company.
But sometimes Jo went up into the garret for a different reason. As I told you, she had a terrible temper — not only that, she went through all kinds of moods — she was what we call "a thorny person." Sometimes, because of her moods, she just needed to be alone.
So she would run up into the garret, and pick up an old, hard, round pillow shaped liked a sausage. This repulsive-looking old pillow was her especial property. If she stood it on its end, that was a sign that any one of her sisters, or her best friend Laurence, or her mother, was allowed to come and sit down next to her on the sofa and chat; but if it lay flat across the sofa, "woe to the man, woman, or child who dared disturb it!" When they were younger, her sisters and Laurence had been pummeled mercilessly by this pillow, and now they knew better than to try to sit next to Jo when it lay flat.
I call this her "mood pillow," and I think it's a great idea. When Jo was grumpy, or furiously angry about something, or when she just needed to be alone, she could signal it to her family and friends using the pillow. She knew she couldn't always control her temper, so she used her mood pillow to signal to those around her that she needed time to cool down — she needed time away from people. The mood pillow helped Jo manage her terrible temper so that she wouldn't hurt those around her with her anger.
Unlike Jo, I don't use a mood pillow. Instead, when I get angry, or upset, I take an hour long walk, no matter what the weather — and when I come back, I've utterly forgotten whatever it was that I was angry about. And now, whenever I do that, I think about the great Unitarian author, Louisa May Alcott, and her wonderful idea of the mood pillow!
Licensed 2006 by Daniel Harper under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/). No commercial uses, attribution required, no derivative works.