"Mrs. Waddles," you replied.
So you took care of Mother so well that she loved you more and more as the days of your knighthood passed; and she took care of you so well that your cheeks grew rosier and your eyes brighter and your legs stronger, and you loved her more and more with the days of her motherhood.
Even being sick was fine in those days, for she brought you little things in bowls with big spoons in them, and you ate till you wanted more—a sign that you would not die. And so you lay in the soft of the pillows, with the patchwork coverlet that Mother made with her own hands. There was the white silk triangle from her wedding-gown, and a blue one from a sash that was her Sunday best, long ago, when she was a little girl. There was a soft-gray piece from a dress of Grandmother's, and a bright-pink one that was once Lizbeth's, and a striped one, blue and yellow, that was once Father's necktie in the gay plumage of his youth.
As you lay there, sick and drowsy, the bridal triangle turned to snow, cold and white and pure, and you heard sleighbells and saw the Christmas cards with the little church in the corner, its steeple icy, but its windows warm and red with the Christmas glow. That was the white triangle. But the blue one, next, was sky, and when you saw it you thought of birds and stars and May; and if it so happened that your eyes turned to the gray piece that was Grandmother's, and the sky that was blue darkened and the rain fell, you had only to look at the pink piece that was Lizbeth's, or the blue and yellow that was Father's, to find the flowers and the sun again. Then the colors blended. Dandelions jingled, sleigh-bells and violets blossomed in the snow, and you slept—the sleep that makes little boys well.
The bees and the wind were humming in the cherry-trees, for it was May. You were all alone, you and Mother, in the garden, where the white petals were falling, silently, like snow-flakes, and the birds were singing in the morning glow.
Your feet scampered down the paths. Your curls bobbed among the budding shrubs and vines. You leaped. You laughed. You sang. In your wide eyes blue of the great sky, green of the grasses. On your flushed cheeks sunshine and breeze. In your beating heart childhood and spring—a childhood too big, a spring too wonderful, for the smallness of one little, brimming boy.
"Look, Mother! See me jump."
"My!" she said.
"And see me almost stand on my head."
"Wonderful!"