“Have it your way,” conceded Uncle Amos. “They don’t do you no hurt, anyhow. But, Rebecca,” he said as they came within sight of her little house, “you ought to get your place painted once.”
“Ach, my goodness, what for? When it’s me here alone. I think the house looks nice. My flowers are real pretty this year, once. Course, I don’t fool with them like you do. I have the kind that don’t take much tendin’ and come up every year without bein’ planted. Calico flowers and larkspur and lady-slippers are my kind. This plantin’ and hoein’ at flowers is all for nothin’. It’s all right to work so at beans and potatoes and things you can eat when they grow, but what good are flowers but to look at! I done my share of hoein’ and diggin’ and workin’ in the ground. I near killed myself when Jonas lived yet, in them tobacco patches. I used to say to him still, we needn’t work so hard and slave like that after we had so much money put away, but he was for workin’ as long as we could, and so we kept on till he went. He used to say money gets all if you begin to spend it and don’t earn more. Jonas was savin’.”
“He sure was, that he was,” seconded Uncle Amos with a twinkle in his eyes. “Savin’ for you and now you’re savin’ for somebody that’ll make it fly when you go, I bet. Some day you’ll lay down and die and your money’ll be scattered. If you leave me any, Becky,” he teased her, “I’ll put it all in an automobile.”
“What, them wild things! Road-hogs, I heard somebody call ’em, and I think it’s a good name. My goodness, abody ain’t safe no more since they come on the streets. They go toot, toot, and you got to hop off to one side in the mud or the ditch, it don’t matter to them. I hate them things! Only don’t never take me to the graveyard in one of them.”
“By that time,” said Uncle Amos, “they’ll have flyin’ machine hearses; they’ll go faster.”
“My goodness, Amos, how you talk! Ain’t you ashamed to make fun at your old sister that way! But Mom always said when you was little that you seemed a little simple, so I guess you can’t help it.”
“Na-ha,” exulted Amanda, with impish delight. “That’s one on you. Aunt Rebecca ain’t so dumb like she lets on sometimes.”
“Ach, no,” Aunt Rebecca said, laughing. “’A blind pig sometimes finds an acorn, too.’”
Aunt Rebecca’s table, though not lavishly laden as are those of most of the Pennsylvania Dutch, was amply filled with good, substantial food. The fried sausage was browned just right, the potatoes and lima beans well-cooked, the cold slaw, with its dash of red peppers, was tasty and the snitz pie--Uncle Amos’s favorite--was thick with cinnamon, its crust flaky and brown.
After the dishes were washed Aunt Rebecca said, “Now then, we’ll go in the parlor.”