Another time when we lived in this house (I don't exactly remember my age), I was told that one Easter we dyed a lot of eggs. My dad said, "My girl can have all the eggs she wants so don't tell her she can't have anymore. Want some more? Have some more eggs." I ate too many eggs and for a long time I had a very upset stomach. At that time most of the medicine was patent medicine that somebody told somebody about. So I took some medicine for my stomachache called "August Flower". It was foul tasting, but every day before dinner time, my dad would get the bottle of medicine and a tablespoon and gave me my "August Flower". One day mother had changed the cupboard around and when I opened my mouth wide my dad gave me a big tablespoon of "Sloan's Liniment". This was to be used externally only. It burned my throat and made me very sick. As i was tolds, that incident accounted for me having further stomach trouble. I was sort of a picky eater after that.
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We had a fun game that we played with our little colt. The mother of this little colt had died and we raised it opn the bottle. We petted it, wrapped it in a blanket and nursed it to health. It followed us everywhere, we all loved it. When we went into the house it would follow us in the back door, which was a long way from the kitchen so my mother couldn't always heear us from there, not too easily anyway. So we would bring the colt upastairs to play and we would be fairly quiet until it was time to go downstairs when the little colt would whinny because it couldn't go down the stairs. So one of us whould each take a leg and would get it downstairs. If we made too much noise, my mother would call, "Do you kids have that horse in the house again?" Of course we would say, "No, no." We would keep the colt quiet until we could get it outdoors again. We did that until the horse got so big that we couldn't manage this anymore. Then one day my dad set us all down and told us that something had to happen to this little colt. He said we had ruined it, it was not suitable for anything. It would not obey the adults so he couldn't make a work horse out of it or make it part of a team. he said they would need to either sell it or shoot it. So after much pleading, he listend
ed to our side and he told us his side, then he said, "We can not afford to feed any animals that are not beneficial to the farm and the horse is too big for you to play with anymore. You are going to get hurt because the horse will not know enough to not step on you, so this is what will have to happen." We never did know what happened to the colt but I think it was sold.
One of the most mischievous things that I remember occurred when my dad and mother would go to town. They would go to get supplies and go to the post office and it usually took the whole day. Mother would give me a litle lecture in the morning, telling me exactly what i was supposed to do. I would listen intently, but as soon as she was gone, knowing she would be gone all day, I would try to think of something I really wanted to do that I couldn't do when she was there. Under the bed upstairs my mother kept a couple of cases that salesmen used to carry from door to door selling suit samples, dresser scarves, etc. if people remember such a thing. When these boxes were empty, salesmen would give my mother some, fastened together with a big strap. I knew what was in the boxes, so I would take my sisters upstairs and we would open up the boxes and take out some of the summer party dresses. These were always white dresses with dainty eyelets, ruffles and lace. I would dress us all up in these pretty dressses with pink or blue satan ribbon sashes. We all had black patent Mary Jane slippers to wear with these dresses. Since we girls were graduated in size, only one new outfit had to be bought each year. We would put these on and we wouldf play that we were little princesses all day long being careful not to get them dirty. We were sure that princesses and queens stayed dressed up all the time. We would have a wonderful time pretending who we were, until i knew it was pretty close to time for mother to get home. I would take the clothes off and fold them up and put them cack in the cases and tie the strap. I felt sure my mother would never know about it.
Another day we did another thing. In cold weather, the house was so big that we only heated part of it. So we would run around and do forbidden thinks. This day we went into this big room that qwas built by Ruth Rowland, as i told you before. The room had a big dance floor. We did not use this room in the winter. Somehow one of us had a glass of water and it got spilled on the floor and a little later I discovered it was frozen, real icy. So a bright idea came into my head and we carried buckets of water, poured it on the floor and let it freeze. We made ourselves a beautiful skating rink and pretended to skate until we knew it was time for mother to come home. I don't remember if we got punished for that. I think we got away with it. I don't know whether anybody knew why that water was on the floor. That was one of our real happy times. I believe the reason I had this instinct to do these things must have been that I had so much responsibility all the time that I had to break loose when my mother went away and left me in charge. She still would leave me in charge even after I got into some kind of trouble.
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