Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/333

 changed was everything, and yet how unchanged. The same houses and barns stood where she had always seen them, the same people, looking scarcely different, moved in and out. But everything was stark now, bald and bare that in her childhood had been softened by haze, mysterious and beautiful. Beautiful indeed and mysterious the world had seemed then. She called to memory many things out of her happy childhood, the scent of drying tobacco and autumn evenings when they legged it, all five of them, around the clothesline prop, sniffing the winy air like young hounds. There were delirious June mornings, too, when she scampered down the pasture to bring up the cows, and pure April twilights lilac-scented that quickened into being young tendrils of fancy as airy and opalescent as morning gossamer.

How glad and forward looking had been all that time, how forward looking all the thoughts and stirrings and bubblings of youth, always reaching out, reaching out—to what?

Snorting and neighing in the glorious make believe that they were a prancing team, the boys came around the corner of the house trundling a homemade wagon. Annie, driving the wagon, uttered shrill squeals and giggles of delight.

In the half gloom of the kitchen the mother smiled mournfully. It was their day now. But their day too would soon be over, and the question remained unanswered. To what?

She took up the milk bucket and went out to do up the evening chores. When she had fed the hogs and chickens and milked the cows and strained and put away the milk, she sliced some meat for supper and mixed the corncake batter, then sat down to mend a tear in one of Annie's dresses. As she sewed she lifted her eyes often to the window.

From the day that they had moved into the windy little house on the hill, the sunset had begun to reach out hands to her. She had grown into the habit of looking forward to the end of the day. Its approach meant that the waking hours of dismal tasks and constant frets and cares would soon be over, that the whines and wails and wrangles, the scraping of chairs, the tramping of muddy shoes, the whole meaningless