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Show 41 "A woman's calendar, " Arnfred Christensen, our new bishop, also school principal, called it. "Never argue with a woman about a date, or what happened what year! " "I know thus and so happened that year;' Sharl Dunn would say. "Because that was the year my Arnold was born!'"Or my Raymond. " Vetris was my baby from the day she was born. I bathed her, tended her from morning to night. I had a playhouse made out of the piano box, and took her there much of the time, or pushed her carriage up and down the street in the shade of Jackman's poplar trees until she went to sleep. "Mama, can I have Vetris?" I asked one day. "What a notion! " Mama said. "What gives you that idea?" "Well, I bathe and change and tend her all the time. Why can't I live in my playhouse and have her for my own baby?" "What would you do when she got hungry?" "I'd bring her to you and let you nurse her and then I would go back to my playhouse with her. " "Then, she'd be my baby, wouldn't she?" Mama asked logically, and my arguments crumbled. "Don't worry, " she said. "Someday you will be a woman like me and you will have your own babies. " That day seemed a long way off from being only seven. When Mama got a new baby I got the old one. I always had one in my arms, like an appendage. Grant came when I was nine, Rachel when I was |
