2018.06.06

It's Wednesday.

All along the road the wild larkspur was blossoming pink and blue and white, birds balanced on yellow plumes of goldenrod, and butterflies were fluttering. Starry daisies lighted the shadows under trees, squirrels chattered on branches overhead, white-tailed rabbits hopped along the road, and snakes wiggled quickly across it when they heard the wagon coming. Deep in the lowest valley the creek was running, in the shadows of dirt bluffs. When Laura looked up those bluffs, she couldn’t see the prairie glass at all. Trees grew up the bluffs where the earth had crumbled, and where the bare dirt was so steep that trees couldn’t grow on it bushes held on desperately with their roots. Half-naked roots were high above Laura’s head. Laura asked Pa where the Indian camps were. He had seen the Indians’ deserted camps, here among the bluffs. But he was too busy to show them to her now. He must get the rocks to build the fireplace. He said to the girls that they could play but asked them not go out of his sight and not go into the water, and not play with snakes, because some of the snakes down here were poison. So Laura and Mary played by the creek, while Pa dug the rocks he wanted and loaded them into the wagon. They watched long-legged water bugs skate over the glassy-still pools. They ran along the bank to scare the frogs, and laughed when the green-coated frogs with their white vests plopped into the water. They listened to the wood-pigeons call among the trees, and the brown thrush singing. They saw the little minnows swimming all together in the shallow places where the creek ran sparkling. The minnows were thin gray shadows in the rippling water, only now and again one minnow flashed the sunshine from its silvery belly.