It was a proud year. Pony Pony saved her money. Thanksgiving came. Pony Pony said, “I am going to get a squash to make a squash pie.” She hunted from one grocery to another; she kept her eyes on the farm wagons coming into Elgin with squashes.
She found what she wanted, the yellow squash spotted with gold spots. She took it home, cut it open, and saw the inside was like the outside, all rich yellow spotted with gold spots.
There was a shine like silver. She picked and plunged with her fingers and pulled and pulled till at last she pulled out the shine of silver.
“It’s a sign; it is a signal,” she said. “It is a buckle, a slipper buckle, a Chinese silver slipper buckle. It is the mate to the other buckle. Our luck is going to change. Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo!”
She told her father and mother about the buckle. They went back to the farm in Nebraska. The wind by this time had been blowing and blowing for three years, and all the pop corn was blown away.
“Now we are going to be farmers again,” said Jonas Jonas Huckabuck to Mama Mama Huckabuck and to Pony Pony Huckabuck. “And we are going to raise cabbages, beets and turnips; we are going to raise squash, rutabaga, pumpkins and peppers for pickling. We are going to raise wheat, oats, barley, rye. We are going to raise corn such as Indian corn and kaffir corn—but we are not going to raise any pop corn for the pop corn poppers to be popping.”
And the pony-face daughter, Pony Pony Huckabuck, was proud because she had on new black slippers, and around her ankles, holding the slippers on the left foot and the right foot, she had two buckles, silver buckles, Chinese silver slipper buckles. They were mates.
Sometimes on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas and New Year’s, she tells her friends to be careful when they open a squash.
“Squashes make your luck change good to bad and bad to good,” says Pony Pony.
