Children's stories, American; Fairy tales -- United States; Fantasy literature; Short stories
It was a proud year. Pony Pony saved her money. Thanksgiving came. Pony
Pony said, “I am going to get a squash to make a squash pie.” She hunted
from one grocery to another; she kept her eyes on the farm wagons coming
into Elgin with squashes.
She found what she wanted, the yellow squash spotted with gold spots.
She took it home, cut it open, and saw the inside was like the outside,
all rich yellow spotted with gold spots.
There was a shine like silver. She picked and plunged with her fingers
and pulled and pulled till at last she pulled out the shine of silver.
“It’s a sign; it is a signal,” she said. “It is a buckle, a slipper
buckle, a Chinese silver slipper buckle. It is the mate to the other
buckle. Our luck is going to change. Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo!”
She told her father and mother about the buckle. They went back to the
farm in Nebraska. The wind by this time had been blowing and blowing for
three years, and all the pop corn was blown away.
“Now we are going to be farmers again,” said Jonas Jonas Huckabuck to
Mama Mama Huckabuck and to Pony Pony Huckabuck. “And we are going to
raise cabbages, beets and turnips; we are going to raise squash,
rutabaga, pumpkins and peppers for pickling. We are going to raise
wheat, oats, barley, rye. We are going to raise corn such as Indian corn
and kaffir corn—but we are _not_ going to raise any pop corn for the pop
corn poppers to be popping.”
And the pony-face daughter, Pony Pony Huckabuck, was proud because she
had on new black slippers, and around her ankles, holding the slippers
on the left foot and the right foot, she had two buckles, silver
buckles, Chinese silver slipper buckles. They were mates.
Sometimes on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas and New Year’s, she tells
her friends to be careful when they open a squash.
“Squashes make your luck change good to bad and bad to good,” says Pony
Pony.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Yang Yang and Hoo Hoo, or the Song of the Left Foot of the Shadow of the
Goose in Oklahoma
Yang Yang and Hoo Hoo were two girls who used to live in Battle Ax,
Michigan, before they moved to Wagon Wheel Gap, Colorado, and back to
Broken Doors, Ohio, and then over to Open Windows, Iowa, and at last
down to Alfalfa Clover, Oklahoma, where they say, “Our Oklahoma home is
in Oklahoma.”
One summer morning Yang Yang and Hoo Hoo woke up saying to each other,
“Our Oklahoma home is in Oklahoma.” And it was that morning the shadow
of a goose flew in at the open window, just over the bed where Yang Yang
and Hoo Hoo slept with their eyes shut all night and woke with their
eyes open in the morning.
The shadow of the goose fluttered a while along the ceiling, flickered a
while along the wall, and then after one more flutter and flicker put
itself on the wall like a picture of a goose put there to look at, only
it was a living picture—and it made its neck stretch in a curve and then
stretch straight.
“Yang yang,” cried Yang Yang. “Yang yang.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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