Weeds

For a while it was very dismal and lonely in the Pippinger household. Bill continued to send the children to school and made shift to do the housework as best he could in his sl...

Jerry had a fine bed of tobacco plants that year and together he and Judith set out four acres. Now that the baby was weaned, Judith could leave him with Luella or Aunt Mary whi...

Lizzie May could hardly wait till she was alone with her sisters in their attic bedroom to tell them that Dan Pooler had asked her to marry him. They were going to try to go to...

Summer months go quickly by. The summer and early fall were soon gone, and the long season of cold and rain set in. The tobacco was a heavy crop. It had been cut and hung in the...

On the evening of the great day, Jerry and Judith took the baby and his bottles over to Aunt Mary Blackford, who was only too glad to have charge of the little darling. Judith f...

They had a long, beautiful fall that year. The warm, still sunny days followed each other week after week without a break, until it seemed as if there could never be wind again...

A few weeks before the arrival of the Evangelists, Hat had sent away a dime and a two cent stamp to certain parties who had advertised in the "Farm Wife's Friend" that for that...

Contrary to Lizzie May's predictions and somewhat to her disappointment, Judith failed to suffer from the marital troubles that increasingly vexed her own life. Jerry proved to...

But with the growth of this harmony with natural things, Judith developed a constantly growing tendency to clash with the life of the school and the home kitchen and the kitchen...

When she was able to be up and around again, she began to be possessed by a great dread and loathing of the thought of the coming on of winter.

The winter that Judith was twelve years old was an unusually bad one. For days the heavy rains fell drearily over the sodden earth. The all-pervading mud went everywhere in the...

That night she set up an old stretcher in the kitchen and made herself a bed out of buggy robes and ragged quilts that had been discarded and used as pads on the wagon seat. She...

Coming suavely and benignly after the cruel winter, the warmth fell like a softly enfolding presence. Spring is a gracious season in Kentucky, full of the smell of flowering loc...

Bill Pippinger was counted to be as good a neighbor, as bountiful a provider and as kind a husband and father as was to be found in the whole of Scott County, Kentucky, accordin...

It seemed that winter as if the spring would never come, as if there would never be an end to the arid routine of corn meal mush and coffee for breakfast, corn meal cakes and co...

The summer days came and went, bringing with them the usual routine that goes with the raising of tobacco in Scott County. After the plants had been set they wilted and looked a...

After the baby's birth the routine of life in the little house in the hollow fell along quite different lines. Judith no longer went with Jerry to the field to hoe or top tobacc...

In September the thing she had begun to dread happened. She found herself with child. To her bodily misery and disgust were added a misery and disgust more deeply seated, more h...

When little Annie had recovered and the danger of contagion was well over, Lizzie May came one Sunday to spend the day with her sister, bringing with her Granville and Viola in...

From early babyhood Judith had shown signs of an energy that craved constant outlet. From the time that she began to creep about on an old quilt spread on the kitchen floor, she...

Moving into the new home was an exciting adventure for Jerry and Judith. Neither of them was much past the playhouse age, and this first home settling was like the realization o...

Two days later, when they got home from Dan's funeral, she thought on going into the kitchen that it smelled stale. Jerry was outside putting up the horses. She set the baby in...

She felt less abjectly miserable after she had learned the cause of her distress of body. As time passed, her symptoms became gradually less violent, and at last disappeared alt...

All that summer, with the unwelcome baby growing in her body, she was tart and irascible and closed herself up morosely from Jerry and his affairs. She showed no interest in his...

The great after war pestilence called "flu" swept across Scott County that fall and winter, sparing neither the old men nor the young virgins. It knocked at many doors, and ofte...