Up a Road Slowly Read Online Free PDF

empty bottles of Le Vieux Corbeau .
    It didn’t seem sad to us that day. The boys lay on the ground kicking their heels and shrieking, and I joined them, kicking almost as high and shrieking quite as lustily.
    During the months of vacation Aunt Cordelia, somewhat against her principles, allowed me to wear my brother’s outgrown blue jeans in order to save wear and tear upon my school dresses. I loved that. There was a freedom in blue jeans that delighted me and brought me into closer relationship with Chris and Danny. Now I could straddle a horse with the same ease that the boys did when we rode over the country roads together. The three of us climbed trees and ran races and helped Mr. Peters cut weeds out of the corn. Mr. Peters called us his “three boys,” and I couldn’t understand how any girl would want a frilly dress when the joy of blue jeans was available. And so that afternoon when we discovered Uncle Haskell’s secret, I was able to kick and roll in the grass with the same abandon enjoyed by Chris and Danny.
    But Chris didn’t approve of my behavior. He had always felt a certain responsibility toward me, and on that afternoon he suddenly stopped laughing and looked at me sternly.
    â€œYou oughtn’t to roll on the grass and kick like a boy, Julie; Laura wouldn’t like for you to act like that.”
    â€œOh, slurp, slurp,” I answered airily, but I sat up all the same, partly because of the reference to Laura, partly because I had a feeling that Danny agreed with my brother.
    But I had Chris to look after me for only a few weeks longer that summer. We had told Father about Uncle Haskell’s cemetery of empty bottles, and I think that our obvious delight in our find set Father to thinking about the advisability of sending Chris away to boarding school. Aunt Cordelia reluctantly seconded the proposal, agreeing with Father that Uncle Haskell was hardly the proper father-figure for a growing boy. And so Chris had to leave for boarding school that fall and both of us were desolate for many weeks. I begged Father to take me home with him after Chris left, but Aunt Cordelia intervened. I was too young, she told Father, too undisciplined to be on my own in town where both Father and Laura were away from home most of the day. I overheard her use the words strong-willed and adventurous in talking about me. She persuaded Father that I should remain with her until I was ready for high school.
    Once again, both Chris and I were manipulated like small puppets in our world of adults. We didn’t like it, and we suffered, but the tall ones around us said that we would soon get over our sadness, that we would “adapt” in a matter of weeks.
    Poor Chris had only strangers around him, which made his life hard that autumn; I still had Danny and the big horse, Peter the Great, that I claimed as my own. I still had the woods with my cathedral hidden in them and I had Aunt Cordelia, who in her reserved way was especially kind to me during the days of my sharpest loneliness. And strangely enough, I found that I had a source of comfort in Uncle Haskell. He came up to the house to eat with us a bit more often that fall, and Aunt Cordelia, true to her mother’s upbringing, made these meals very special ones with the best silver and Grandmother’s china laid out upon the table. Uncle Haskell was always a gracious guest, gay and serene in his belief that he was doing us an honor in dining with us, but an honor which he was bestowing cheerfully.
    There were times when it was good to escape from the quiet austerity of Aunt Cordelia to the gay, never-never land of Uncle Haskell. I was always welcomed to his neat, well-kept living room with its many wall shelves filled about equally with books and bottles. In spite of the fact that I knew the truth wasn’t in him, I gave myself up to the delight of listening to accounts of the mythical years when he had roamed the capitals of