Well, it was time to go home, and try to convince our parents that we all needed a vacation very badly. For some reason I wasn’t sure my folks would say I could go.
3
“HOW’LL we do it?” I asked Poetry, as he and Dragonfly and I stopped at our gate to let Poetry and Dragonfly go on home, and to let me go on in.
“How’ll we do what?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and right away sneezed at something or other, probably at some of the flowers in Mom’s little flower bed around our mail box.
Dragonfly reached for and pulled out of his hip pocket his pop’s big red bandana handkerchief and grabbed his nose just in time to stop most of the next three sneezes, which came in one-two-three style as fast as a boy pounding a nail with a hammer.
“How’ll we convince our parents that we need a vacation?” Poetry said, and Dragonfly piped up and said, “People take vacations when they’re worn out from too much work.”
“Overworking?” I said, and Dragonfly sneezed again, and looked down at Mom’s very pretty happy-looking different-colored gladiolus in the half-moon flower bed around the mail box.
“If you don’t quit planting gladioluses around here, I can’t come over and play here anymore.”
“Or work, either,” Poetry said, and I said, “Well, you guys better beat it, I’ve got to overwork a little.” I opened our gate, squeezed through it and started on the run for our tool shed where I found a nice clean hoe which I’d cleaned myself the last time I’d used it, and in a few jiffies I was out in our garden hoeing potatoes as hard as I could, getting hotter and hotter and sweating like everything. Sweat was running off my face and I could feel it on my back, too. With a little wind blowing across from the woods and Sugar Creek I felt fine even in the hot sun. I certainly wasn’t getting tired as fast as I thought I would on account of when a boy sweats at hard work and the wind blows a little, he feels better than when he just kinda lazies around and tries to keep cool.