Milkweed Ladies Read Online Free PDF Page B

whiteness would quiet, bubble softly, and begin to “smoke its pipe,” breaking the bubbles with brown puffs.
    Ward and Elizabeth and I would take our lantern and our tin pie pans and go up on the hill to hunt for a patch of clean snow to make wax balls. When Mama dribbled thickening syrup over the snowy mounds we had gathered, the amber wax would harden into clear, maple taffy.
    Mama and Granny Fanny knew all the signs exactly: when to skim off the white, dirty froth; when to run the fatback over the roiling kettle; and when to take off the molasses and sugar. When we were “sugaring off,” the hot sugar was stirred and poured into greased pans and “suggins,” to be knockedout later, when it was cool, and to be stored high on the pantry shelf for sweetening apple dumplings, oatmeal, and pumpkin pie.
    After sugar season, we watched eagerly for signs of open spring. One of the first signs was when Granny Fanny went out to the woods to dig up roots for sassafras tea. She put the red roots and pieces of bark in a pot on the back of the stove and boiled her spicy, red tea. We drank it hot and heavily sweetened, and Granny said it would thin our winter blood.

    Soon after sassafras time, it was green-up time, with the first shoots coming up out of the ground. We watched the sprouts hopefully, for this was the time of year for Granny to go to the fields and woods to pick her wild greens, the “sallets” of the old frontier. Granny Fanny taught us all the plants, and how to tell the good greens from the bad. We gathered the new poke sprouts, always being careful not to snip them too close to their poison roots; and we gathered “spotted leaf,” leaves of “lamb's tongue,” butter-and-eggs, curly dock, new blackberry sprouts, dandelions, and a few violet leaves. Later the white meadow weed would be good, and the shepherd's purse and milkweed sprouts. It took six gallons of leaves to make a mess of greens, and Granny would boilthem in the black pot, drain off the potlikker, and fry them in hog grease because there was a saying that poke greens must be fried in hog grease or the poke would poison you to death.
    Green-up time was also ramp season; but Mama wouldn't let a ramp come into the house, for the ramp is a vile-smelling wood's onion whose odor, like memory, lingers on. Some of our neighbors and cousins hunted ramps every spring and carried them home in gunnysacks to boil and fry. In the spring down at school, the teacher would sometimes have to throw the windows wide open to air out the smell of ramps, wet woolen stockings, and kid sweat.

    Sex was never mentioned in our house, but in the barn and barnyard we learned early when the cows were in heat—“on a rippet,” we called it—and G.D. would drive them to some neighbor's bull. G.D. wrote down on the kitchen calendar when each cow had gone to the bull, and we turned the buck sheep in with the ewes. One time G.D. had a man bring a stallion for old Bird and told us not to cross the fence or come near. The stallion nickered and carried on and jumped up on old Bird, but no colt came. And we saw the frogs breeding in Grandpa Will's pond, and the roosterjumping on the hens, and the birds breeding, the butterflies, and even the house flies. Then we hunkered in the barn and sheep shed and watched the bloody borning of the lambs and calves.
    The earliest lambs were usually March lambs, and the mothers lay on beds of hay tossed down from the mow. The lambs were wet and wobbly at first but would soon be running out in the stubble field, shaking their long tails and playing chase with one another. Sometimes a bad mother sheep wouldn't let her baby suck, wouldn't “claim it,” we said. She would butt him and whirl around from his hungry punching, and he would cry so weak and small. Then we kids would gather him up in our arms and carry him to an old carpet behind the woodbox and feed him bottles of warm milk from the