East to the Dawn by Susan Butler Page B

solution.
    â€œThis particular elevator isn’t for sale,” she said. “But,” she continued, looking secretive and mysterious, “I know how we can rent it for the afternoon.”
    â€œYou do? Sure?” the little boy asked.
    â€œI do. Dead sure. Shall we rent?”
    â€œSure. Let‘s,” said the boy.
    They spent the afternoon in the elevator, and except that the elevator operator was a little stunned, everything went off very well.
    Amelia suffered through the self-conscious phase as most preadolescents do. Bloomers were much easier to move in than the ruffled pinafores over long full-skirted dresses that they usually wore, as Amy’s sister Margaret had proved as a young girl, when she had secretly had a pair of bloomers made and gone bike riding. Amy had not joined Margaret’s bloomer escapade, but it had made a deep impression on her; now she had dark blue flannel bloomers made for Amelia and Muriel to wear while pursuing their more strenuous activities. But the dress code in Atchison was still rigid—so rigid, a girl at school a few years older than Amelia was branded as “fast” because three or four inches of calf above her ankle
became exposed when she crossed her legs. So Amelia’s bloomers, being unusual, even though a generation later than her aunt‘s, still drew comment. Amelia observed that “though we felt terribly ’free and athletic,‘we also felt somewhat as outcasts among the little girls who fluttered about us in their skirts.”
    Edwin gave the girls baseballs and bats and, in response to Amelia’s request one Christmas, a football. Another of his Christmas presents was a .22 rifle. The girls already possessed a BB gun, with which they popped bottles off the back fence; the .22 was to shoot rats in the barn. There were a lot of rats, for according to the faithful Charlie Parks, the grain bins and side walls of the harness room got to look “pretty much like a sieve” by the time they were through.
    Amelia was a collector. She had a special trunk in which she kept a collection of bones, including a cow’s skull that Amy wanted her to throw out, and spiders. A particular species of spiders—trap spiders—were the ones she particularly cherished, for they had hinged backs. “That,” Amelia pointed out to her mother, referring to the hinged backs, “is efficiency.” She collected various moths, including a luna, a regal, and a cecropia, as well as katydids, toads, and a praying mantis. Sometimes with Muriel’s aid she held worm races. For this novel activity Amelia would make a harness of a blade of grass, a sulky out of a small leaf, and mark out a course that she tried to make the worms follow.
    Another occupation to which Amelia applied her penchant for the unusual and the inventive was cooking. Because there was no outdoor cooking facility at her grandparents’ house, on nice days she and Katch and Lucy made their Saturday lunches outdoors “on a brick oven of our own construction.” Most of what they cooked was basic: “Fried eggs were the principal dish, as I remember,” Amelia admitted. But she also tried to make manna, after hearing in the Trinity Church Sunday school how it dropped down from Heaven on the children of Israel. She decided it “should be small, white, round muffins, a cross between a popover and angel food cake,” and she “expended a good deal of energy and flour and sugar in trying to reproduce it,” but it never did come out anything close to what she wanted.
    A few years later in Des Moines, Amelia was drawn to food experiments of a different kind. She loved radishes and, on the premise that if small ones were good, big ones might be even better, she decided to experiment. The result of her labor was radishes that were, when harvested, the size of potatoes—slightly pink, with porous centers. She ate a morsel of one of the