Barbara had the giggling Carlyle in her arms when Emma went back into the kitchen. In passing, she patted the child's curly head and started to wash her dishes. Her china was carefully stored in the new cupboard and there it would remain until the children were big enough to respect it. Emma remembered poignantly one of her minor heartbreaks of years ago. The Casper family, departing for the west, had decided that their china was too frail to stand the trip so they'd given it to Emma. It was lovely, delicate ware that had come across an ocean, been used by the Caspers in New York, and brought by them to Missouri. Emma delighted in its feel, and her heart lifted when she merely looked at it. Often she speculated about its history. It was ancient and expensive, the sort of china wealthy people of good taste would buy. Had it come from some castle in England, or perhaps Spain? Who were the people, now probably long dead, who had made merry over it? Delighted and thrilled, Emma had set the table with it. But Barbara, at the time their only child, was a baby then and she had pushed her cup and plate onto the floor where they shattered. Emma put the rest away and used her old dishes until they, too, were broken. Joe, always handy with tools, had made her wooden plates, bowls, and cups. He had used hard, seasoned maple, and had worked endlessly with it until it was polished almost to the consistency of china. As each new baby arrived, Joe had made more table ware. They were almost alike, but not exactly so, and Emma had handled and washed them so often that every line in every piece was familiar. She knew by touch which plate, cup, or bowl, belonged to whom, and that gave her a good feeling. Just as it was part of Joe's life to respond intimately to the goodness in new-turned earth, it was part of hers to care for the various things that meant security for her family. Security, to Emma, meant no one big thing but a host of little ones. She soaked her hands in the warm water, liking the feel of that too, while she washed the dishes with a soapy cloth. Rinsing them in clean water, she stacked them on the table beside her. She did it carefully, meticulously. Wooden dishes could not break, but it was part of her nature to be meticulous and nothing at all was so easy to get that one could afford to be careless with it. Besides, the dishes were precious. Joe had spent long hours, night hours when he could not work in the fields, making and polishing them. Where a less particular man would have called them good enough, Joe had worked on. He did not, he said, want to take the chance of any slivers finding their way into baby mouths.