A Girl from Yamhill Read Online Free PDF Page A

hurt his feelings.” How could I hurt his feelings when I so admired his bald head? I once tried to cut off my own hair so I could be bald, too.
    We usually stopped at the drugstore for a few words with Uncle Ray, my one uncle who had been sent to college, because Grandfather Bunn felt he was too fat to ever become a farmer. My father had wanted to become a pharmacist, too, but his father said no, he was cut out to farm.
    Uncle Ray generously handed an ice cream cone across the counter to his niece. “Say thank you and sit down to eat it so you won’t spill” were Mother’s rules.
    â€œThank you, Uncle Ray,” I said before I sat at a round table at the back of the store near the mysterious little room filled with apothecary jars, beakers, and mortars and pestles where Uncle Ray mixed medicines. I licked my cone, swungmy feet, and stared at Great grandfather Hawn’s ox yoke that hung on the wall.
    At Trullinger-Eustice, the general merchandise store, Mother made a small purchase or two, a spool of thread or a can of baking powder, and paused to chat with Lottie Allen, a saleswoman of strong opinions who pounded the dry goods counter with her fist and frequently said “absolutely, positively”—fascinating words.
    As soon as we left the store, I began to sprinkle my conversation with the new words. “Little girls don’t say ‘absolutely, positively,’” said Mother, amused even as she made her new rule.
    Sometimes we stopped at “Aunt” Fannie McKern’s house. “Aunt” Fannie was not my aunt. The whole town, except Mother, called her Aunt Fannie. Mother said calling people not related to one Aunt or Grandma was a very small-town custom. I must call Aunt Fannie Mrs. McKern. “It’s good manners.”
    Mrs. McKern fascinated all of Yamhill’s children because she was “Central,” which meant she operated the town’s telephone switchboard from her living room. We loved to watch her plug cords carrying telephone calls into little holes that connected callers to the person called, and unplug them when the conversation ended. She also had a bearskin rug, which I admired. I got down onthe floor and lay nose to nose with the bear with his open mouth full of big teeth.
    â€œBeverly, get up off the floor,” said Mother. “We don’t lie on other people’s floors.”
    Mother dragged me past the barbershop, where I wanted to see whose face emerged from the lather the barber was scraping away with a straight-edge razor. Pressing my nose against the barbershop window, it turned out, was unladylike.
    We did, however, stop at the post office with its wall of little bronze boxes with dials that had to be turned a certain way before the box could be opened. Our box usually held The Oregonian and sometimes a magazine. In front of the post office, Mother, starved for grown-up conversation, paused to visit with other women. “Remember,” she whispered, “little girls should be seen and not heard.” This was one rule I loved.
    Being seen and not heard, I gleaned all sorts of interesting information. A bride scraped burned toast on the back porch every morning; someone could hear it across a field. The ladies shook their heads and wondered what kind of meals her husband was eating. A woman had been heard to say, “I just love to knead bread. It cleans the hands so.” The ladies clucked like hens and vowed they would never eat any of her bread. A minister’s dog stole a neighbor’s butter; someonesuggested the minister had trained him to steal because the minister was going hungry in Yamhill. The ladies laughed, but Mother whispered to me, “They’re just joking. They know he didn’t train his dog to steal.”
    Sometimes the most interesting and mysterious conversations ended when Mother shot a glance at me and said, “Little pitchers have big ears.” The ladies’