“Not now, but I used to,” said Grandma. Then she brought three stools from the corner—low, round stools covered with carpet. “You children sit on these stools and I’ll sit in this chair and we’ll spend the evening getting acquainted. You must tell me all about yourselves.”
The children told Grandma about their school and their playmates, their dog and their playhouse, about how they went camping in summer time and what they did on Christmas and Easter, and about the flying machine that flew over the town on the Fourth of July, and about the Sunday school picnic. When they finally stopped, breathless, Grandma looked so impressed that Bobby said pityingly, “You didn’t have so many things to do when you were little, did you, Grandma?”
“Well, now, I don’t know about that,” Grandma answered slowly. “We didn’t have the same things to do, but we had good times, too.”
“Tell us about them,” Alice begged.
“When I was a little girl,” Grandma began, “I lived in the country on a large farm. All around our house were fields and woods. You might think I would have been lonely, but I never was. You see, I had always lived there. Then I had six older brothers and sisters, and one brother, Charlie, was just two years older than I was. And there were so many things to do! The horses to ride to water and the cows to bring from the pasture field. On cool mornings Charlie and I would stand on the spots where the cows had lain all night, to get our feet warm before starting back home. I had a pet lamb that followed me wherever I went, and we had a dog—old Duke. He helped us get the cows and kept the chickens out of the yard and barked when a stranger came in sight. And when the dinner bell by the kitchen door rang, how he did howl!
“And the cats! You never saw such cats, they were so fat and round and sleek. No wonder, for they had milk twice a day out of a hollow rock that stood by the barnyard gate.
“And birds were everywhere. Near the well, high in the air, fastened to a long pole, was a bird house. Truman and Joe had made it, and it was just like a little house, with tiny windows and doors and a wee bit of a porch where the birds would sit to sun themselves.
“Then there were the chickens to look after, often a hundred baby chicks to feed and put in their coops at night. And in the spring what fun we had hunting turkey hens’ nests! In February we tapped the sugar trees and boiled down the sap into maple sugar and sirup. We had Easter egg hunts and school Christmas treats, and in the fall we gathered in the nuts for winter—chestnuts, hickory nuts, walnuts.”
Grandma paused a moment and glanced at the clock on the mantel.