“Many times before spring came, the Indians passed that way, but they never needed another invitation to come in to get warm. They just walked in. They weren’t being impolite. They were really being very logical and reasonable. If the white squaw wanted them in on one cold day, why not on any cold day? Great-grandmother would hear the latch click, and she’d look up from her spinning to see her brown-skinned friends glide in. Occasionally she gave them something to eat, hot tea and corn bread. Sometimes they gave her a present in return. Once she got a basket, and toward spring there were gifts of maple sugar that delighted the children.
“Great-grandmother longed for spring. She watched the buds grow large on the maple trees. Morning came earlier and evening stayed longer. One day she looked out to see a great flock of geese, with their necks outstretched, flying in perfect formation to the Canadian lakes. She called to the children to watch them.
“‘See,’ she said. ‘Spring is here at last.’
“The snow melted and it rained. It rained and rained. The road to the settlement was impassible. It was so muddy that the oxen would have bogged down at every step. Great-grandmother didn’t mind except that the sugar barrel was empty. The flour barrel was almost empty too. There was a little tea in the canister over the fireplace, and part of a slab of bacon hung from the rafters.
“‘We won’t be hungry for another week or so,’ said Great-grandmother as she poured corn meal into a bowl and stirred away at the all too familiar johnnycake.”
“What’s a johnnycake, Mom?” asked Davey.
“It’s another name for corn bread,” said Mom and she kept right on with her story.
“At the side of the cabin rose a brown hump of earth with a wooden ventilator sticking out of the top. It looked like a fat brown man sleeping with a pipe in his mouth. Do any of you children know what it was?”
They looked puzzled, but Janie had a gleam in her eye. “I think I know,” she said. “It must have been a root cellar. We saw them in New Salem where Abraham Lincoln once lived. Weren’t they used for storing potatoes and things like that?”
“That’s right,” said Mom. “It was a root cellar. Great-grandmother searched carefully, but the potatoes were gone, and the carrot bin was empty. The last of the turnips and pumpkins had been used in March. There never was a root cellar that looked more like Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. She picked up her candle and started to leave when she spied a crock jar in a far corner.