Pretty soon I was tired of being up on that narrow two-by-four crossbeam, so I wriggled myself down and walked over to the water tank on the other side of the pump where about twenty-seven yellow butterflies, seeing me come, made a scramble in about twenty-seven different fluttering directions of up, then right away the yellow air was quiet again as most of the twenty-seven settled themselves down all around the edge of a little water puddle.
Maybe I could get Pop’s insect book and look up a new insect for him. Maybe I could look up something about yellow butterflies, which laid their eggs on Mom’s cabbage plants and also the green larvae, which hatched out and ate the cabbages. But I wasn’t interested in getting any more education just then.
Spying my personally owned hoe leaning against the tool house on the other side of the grape arbor, an idea popped into my head—and out again quick—to do a few minutes baby-sitting by hoeing a couple of rows of potatoes in the garden just below the pignut trees near which Pop had buried Old Addie’s two red-haired pigs; but for some reason or other I began to feel very tired and I could tell it would be very boring to baby-sit that way.
I mosied along out to where Old Addie was doing her own baby-sitting near a big puddle of water beside her apartment house, lying in some straw that was still clean. She was acting very lazy and sleepy and grunting while her six red-haired, lively youngsters were having a noisy afternoon lunch.
“Pretty soft,” I said down to her but she didn’t act like she even recognized me.
I was remembering a silly little rhyme, which I had heard in school when I was in the first grade and it was:
Six little pigs in the straw with their mother,
Bright-eyed, curly-tailed, tumbling on each other.
Bring them apples from the orchard trees,
And hear those piggies say, “Please, please, please.”