Maw's Vacation: The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone

Book excerpt: TIMES has changed, says Maw to herself, says she. Things ain't like what they used to be. Time was when I worked from sunup to sundown, and we didn't have no daylight-saving contraptions on the old clock, neither. The girls was too little then, and I done all the work myself—cooking, sweeping, washing and ironing, suchlike. I never got to church Sundays because I had to stay home and get the Sunday dinner. Like enough they'd bring the preacher home to dinner. You got to watch chicken—it won't cook itself. Weekdays was one like another, and except for shoveling snow and carrying more coal I never knew when summer quit and winter come. There was no movies them days—a theater might come twice a winter, or sometimes a temperance lecturer that showed a picture of the inside of a drunkard's stomach, all redlike and awful. We didn't have much other entertainment. Of course we had church sociables now and then, or a surprise party on someone. Either way, the fun no more than paid for the extra cooking. I never seen nothing or went nowhere, and if when I was down town after the groceries I'd 'a' stepped into the drug store and bought me a lemonade—and they didn't have no nut sundaes then—they'd of had me up before the church for frivolous conduct. Of course Paw kicks about the crops and prices, but I've been living with Paw forty years, and I dunno as I can remember a time when he didn't kick. He kicks now on the wages he pays these city boys that come out to farm; says they're no good at all. But somehow or other, things gets raised. I notice the last few years we somehow have had more clothes and things, and more money in the bank. When Paw bought the automobile he didn't ask the minister if it was right, and he didn't have to ask the bank for a consent, neither. Cynthy's back from college, and it's all paid for somehow. Jimmy's in a mail-order store in Chicago. I've got a girl to help me that calls herself a maid, which is all right enough, though we used to call Judge Harmsworth's help a girl and let it go at that, law me! My other girls, Hattie and Roweny, are big enough to help a lot, and Paw reasons with them considerable about it. I've always been so used to work that I think I can do it better myself. I always like to do for my children.