Winterbound Read Online Free Page A

Winterbound
Book: Winterbound Read Online Free
Author: Margery Williams Bianco
Pages:
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the old truck didn’t stick, for the swamp water had preserved the logs and the corduroy road, though broken in places, was still good for a long time to come. Soon the skeleton trees and dead stumps gave way to thick undergrowth, alder and scarlet swamp maple, the corduroy to a firmer wagon road, and with the wayside bushes brushing the windshield as the truck forced its way through, they came out again into open country.
    â€œThere’s the old house I was born in, and where I lived most of the time I was a boy,” said Neal, pointing presently to a gray weathered frame house with a red barn near it. “There’s the same old woodshed, and the same old pump where I drawed water many a time.”
    He slowed up to wave to a youngish man who was splitting wood outside the house.
    â€œHello, Neal!”
    â€œHow’s the folks?”
    â€œFine. Takin’ your apples over?”
    â€œThey ain’t much good this year. I figure we might get a barrel out of the whole lot. Where’s Bert?”
    â€œOver to the mill. They been workin’ there all morning. Guess they’ll be able to put yours through now.” “Gid-dap!” said Neal, addressing the truck.
    Two little girls who had come out from the house door stared gravely at the truck and its passengers. The four children stared back. There was a lurch and Martin clutched at the rolling mound of apples behind him. They rode on, turned at a crossroad. The roofs of buildings showed between the trees. They had reached the cider mill.
    In spite of early morning frosts the weather had still held so mild that Garry found plenty to do yet in the garden. She had set the missing glass in her cold-frame, built from a few boards and some old sash found in the cellar and set in a sunny angle by the woodshed. She was sowing cabbage, cauliflower, and lettuce in one side to come up early in the spring, and in the other seeds for the flower garden she still hoped to have next summer. By a contrivance of her own involving various boxes of earth, some old matting, and a considerable portion of the floor space in that part of the shed adjoining the kitchen, she planned to keep the family supplied with salad andfresh parsley during the winter, little realizing as yet what a Connecticut winter could be like.
    The famous living-room stove had arrived the day after the auction, and Edna’s dark hints were explained. Requiring the efforts of two men to transport her piecemeal from the truck to the spot where she now stood finally assembled, Big Bertha, as the Ellis children had instantly christened her, belonged to the days when stoves were stoves. Towering and immense, she took up the whole hearth, all but blocking the fireplace that had been Kay’s joy. No modern simplicity of design about Bertha. She was ornate and dreadful, with scrolls and curlicues everywhere about her. Her bulging cast-iron sides displayed a design in high relief, strikingly inappropriate, of storks wading on one leg amid a lake of bulrushes, while her summit, overtopping Mrs. Ellis’s head, was graced by a strange ornament resembling a lopsided funeral urn. But hideous as she was she promised warmth and comfort; she had already an air of presiding over the family welfare, and Mrs. Ellis, feeling guiltily responsible for her looks, defended her warmly.
    â€œIt isn’t so easy to pick up a good second-hand stove like that at the beginning of winter, and looks aren’t half as important as comfort, if you can’t have both. If you ask me, we’re pretty lucky. . . .”
    But here she was obliged to stop, for Penny’s commentin almost every situation involving minor doubts or criticisms usually began, “we’re pretty lucky”—and the phrase had become a household word.
    â€œIt wouldn’t be so easy to pick up that stove any time,” Garry agreed, and Martin giggled promptly.
    â€œGarry might bring some of her boxes of earth in
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