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Updated: July 1, 2025
"It's a chicken-coop!" squealed Rose-Ellen as they walked over to it. "Gramma wants to live in a chicken-coop!" "It's empty. And it'd be a sight easier to clean than some places where humans have lived," Grandma replied stoutly. So the Beechams got permission to live in the farmer's old chicken-coop. It had two rooms, and the men pitched the tent beside it for a bedroom.
Thus began the friendship between the Beecham children and Cissy, Tom and Mary with toddling Georgie and the baby thrown in. Cissy was beautiful, like Grandma's old cameo done in color, with heavy, loose curls of gold-brown hair. Long evening, visits she and Rose-Ellen had, when they were not too tired from cotton-picking. Little by little Rose-Ellen learned the story of Cissy's past few years.
All the children who had not had scarlet fever came down with it. It was even hotter than midsummer Philadelphia, and the air was sticky, and black with flies besides, and sickening with odor. Grandma's cushiony pinkness entirely disappeared; she was more the color of a paper-bag, Rose-Ellen thought.
On each step stood a man or woman, in boots and heavy clothes, facing the desk. Only instead of pen and paper, these people had buckets, oysters, knives. As fast as they could, they were opening the big, horny oyster shells and emptying the oysters into the buckets. Next time, Dick stayed with Sally, and Rose-Ellen and Jimmie peeked.
The kitchen was even hotter than the half-darkened sitting room where crippled Jimmie sprawled on the floor listlessly wheeling a toy automobile, the pale little baby on a quilt beside him. Grandma squinted through the door at the old Seth Thomas dock in the sitting room. "Half after six! Rose-Ellen, you run down to the shop and tell Grandpa supper's spoiling.
"Hush up, Dick," Grandpa ordered with unusual sharpness. "Can't you see Gramma's clean done out?" Grandma looked "done out," but Rose-Ellen, glancing soberly from one to the other, was sorry for Dick, too-his blue eyes frowned so unhappily. Rose-Ellen tried to change the subject. "Apples!" she said.
"Oh, Rose-Ellen!" Grandma called. Rose-Ellen slowly put down her library book and skipped into the kitchen. Grandma peppered the fried potatoes, sliced some wrinkled tomatoes into nests of wilting lettuce, and wiped her dripping face with the hem of her clean gingham apron.
She clenched her hands under her patched apron when the man shoved her beloved furniture around and glanced contemptuously at the clean old sewing machine that had made them so many nice clothes. "One dollar for the machine, lady." Rose-Ellen tucked her hand into Grandma's as they looked at the few boxes and pieces of furniture they were leaving behind, standing on stilts in Mrs.
When Rose-Ellen asked her if she had ever heard of such a dreadful trip, she shrugged and said she was used to going without sleep. Last year, in asparagus, she and her parents and two brothers cared for twenty-two acres, and when it grew hot "dat grass, oooop she go and we work all night for git ahead of her." Asparagus, even Rose-Ellen knew could grow past using in a day.
With short-handled hoes the grown people chopped out foot-long strips of plants. Dick and Rose-Ellen followed on hands and knees, and pulled the extra plants from the clumps so that a single strong plant was left every twelve inches. The sun rose higher and hotter in the big blue bowl of sky. Rose-Ellen's ragged dress clung to her, wet with sweat, and her arms and face prickled with heat.
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