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Show 4 maple trees, and when we were set free in the afternoon we really let it all out, Henry and the horse and me galloping down the road far in advance of our sisters, the horse farting and Henry yelling whoopee and me holding on and laughing, free in the free fresh air. Flying. The old grey mare was not Pegasus but we felt like Bellerophon, both of us. Below the mesa we entered our west gate and cut across the snowdead fields, thin drifted snow filling the corrugations, and on to the frozen rutted lane and down it to the house with three cottonwood trees in front, and I would slide down and drop to the ground and run inside to my mother, into the big bright warm kitchen filled with the smells of supper, home safe at last. I remember winter nights in that kitchen with the wind howling outside, the night dark and deadly cold but all of us gathered about the big circular oak table, the iron cookstove warming the room, the gasoline mantle lamp brightening it. We gathered there, we kids to do our studies, Dad to read, Mother in her rocking chair mending or darning, and the wind would stop and in that haven of quiet I heard only the rustle of a turned page or the slide of a pencil on paper, a sigh, a chair scrape, the snap of the fire, the soft hiss of the lamp shedding its light in a circle upon us all. When the light began to dim and waver my father would rise, tall and strong; my father would lift the lamp down from its hook in the ceiling and set it upon the table and take out the small silvery pump, like a bicycle pump, and restore the air pressure, brightening the room, holding off the dark, keeping back the winter. Then he would lift the lamp back up to its place, the benign lamplight falling upon us all. I remember the kitchen too for baths and meals and general family life; I remember the parlor only in winter when Dad built an early morning fire in the potbellied roarer and we kids rushed to it from our unheated bedrooms to |