| OCR Text |
Show I l l chided her for not accepting my invitation. Grace had been thirteen herself, once. Eventually we were joined by two other discards, Annie Shelton, and, surprisingly, Emmy. She was too old for the crowd! Mama's wisdom was more appreciated on another occasion. On the farm we either feasted or fasted, speaking nutritionally. Oh, we had as much the year round, but we ran out of vitamins in our food before the coming spring yielded up green onions and radishes. The first greens to appear, even before radishes and onions, was watercress, which grew wild in the streams. Somebody had made drainage ditches in the river bottoms some two miles below town, and here the watercress grew in abundance. Full of snails and water bugs, to be sure, but watercress, nevertheless. One Sunday afternoon in early spring our new crowd, Lasca, Annie, Emmy and I, decided to make a pilgrimmage for watercress. We neglected to tell our parents, because we were on the way to Annie's, across the river, up against the eastern hills, when the notion struck us, so we followed the tracks until we reached our goal. Getting the cress out of the flowing wells, which were several feet deep, without drowning proved to be quite a project, so we spent the afternoon, but eventually got enough cress to fill all our Sunday dress skirts. Suddenly somebody noticed that the sun was going down, and we were supposed, by unwritten law, to be home by sundown. As we plodded up the track, lugging our sodden watercress we could think of nothing else but the wrath that was sure to descend on our heads. |
