Silent Promises 2/5

Laura is at the Pages’ homestead asking Nathan if she can try to teach Daniel sign language. Nathan politely refuses, saying that special training would be required of anyone who is going to engage in special teaching. Laura claims that she is a teacher-in-training and it’s not like Mr. Page has a specialist already lined up. He keeps claiming it’s a waste of time. Dude, the worst that can happen is Daniel doesn’t learn, which means that he is in no worse position than he is now. You have nothing to lose. Oh geez, he plays the “God’s will” card, which Laura counters with “it’s my time I’m wasting (true) and God gave us our own wills (that’s one theory).” Nathan ignores the theological debate bait (debait?), tells Laura she’s wasting her time, but agrees. She starts tomorrow morning.

At the Ingalls’ place, Charles is at the table lighting his after-dinner pipe. We can hear hammering noises in the background, which causes Caroline to ask Charles to ask Albert to hold off on the dog house construction so that the baby can get some sleep. Charles goes to the door and calls out to Albert that it’s quitting time. That was uneventful. Laura comes downstairs with her signing books. She and Pa talk about her new client and that Laura wants to go to the Wilders’ house in the morning so she can tell Ms. Wilder all about it. Charles can read between the lines and suggests telling Ms. Wilder the news at school on Monday. Laura can read between the lines too and they have a little daddy-daughter bonding moment. Aw. Again, uneventful.

The next morning Albert is back to work on the dog house. He has a frame built as Laura heads out for her lesson. Albert asks for her opinion, but Laura says that no dog in its right mind is going to sleep in that box. Albert takes offense to this, wrinkles his nose and asks his sister why she smells like Ma. Y’know, in all my years of bickering with my siblings, I’ve never used “why do you smell like Ma?” as a go to insult or “oh yeah?” variant. Oh, Laura put on some perfume for her visit to the Wilders. Albert knows what’s up and Laura gets a little too indignant about his line of questioning and storms off. Girl, just own the fact that you’re into older guys, alright?

Laura makes her way to Daniel’s house. He sees her through the window and has an ear-to-ear smile as he opens the door for her. He’s got it bad, got it bad, got it bad. Laura signs “Hi”, which doesn’t really register a response since he doesn’t know sign language yet. Laura seems a bit baffled by this and starts flipping through one of her manuals. Daniel walks over to see what she is looking for. She then signs “good morning”. What’s the sign for “ass-backwards”? Laura starts to get a bit flustered that things don’t seem to be registering with Daniel and flips through the manual again. She walks to the window, taps on it, then does the sign for “window”. Okay, that looks a bit more productive albeit low energy. This starts to register with Daniel, so Laura tries the same approach with the door. Daniel does the sign for “window” again and Laura corrects him. They go through a couple more, including “perfume”. Yeah, that one’s going to be useful for day-to-day chores on the Page homestead. Laura does a mini-quiz, but Daniel has trouble with “door”. “Oh well,” Laura says, “nobody said it was gonna be easy.”

An indeterminate amount of time has passed and the lessons have moved to a wooded area. Laura’s going through various abstracts, such as “seeing” (points to her eyes); “funny” (which she signs but doesn’t demonstrate) and “happy” (signs and smiles, which doesn’t really differentiate between her other signs). She does “mad”, which just causes Daniel to look at the audience in polite confusion. Oh, he’s distracted by the picnic setup in the foreground. He signs something then produces a wrapped package. Laura is excited and says “You did it!” Okay? Not too sure what happened there, but hooray. They hug and it starts to rain. She does the sign for “rain”, he mimics, and then there’s a clap of thunder. Maybe you should seek shelter, kids. Instead, they hug and spin in circles, like you do.