been thinking a good deal about that question of Susie's.
What _has_ happened to me, out here on the prairie? What has indeed
come into my life?...

I married young and put a stop to those romantic adventurings which
enrich the lives of most girls and enlighten the days of many women. I
married a man and lived with him in a prairie shack, and sewed and
baked for him, and built a new home and lost it, and began over again.
I had children, and saw one of them die, and felt my girlhood slip
away, and sold butter and eggs, and loved the man of my choice and
cleaved to him and planned for my children, until I saw the man of my
choice love another woman. And still I clung to my sparless hulk of a
home, hoping to hold close about me the children I had brought into
the world and would some day lose again to the world. And that was
all. That was everything. It is true, nothing much has ever happened
to me....

But I stop, to think this over. If these are the small things, then
what are the big things of life? What is it that other women get? I
have sung and been happy; I have known great joy and walked big with
Hope. I have loved and been loved. I have known sorrow, and I have
known birth, and I have sat face to face with death. I have, after
all, pretty well run the whole gamut, without perhaps realizing it.
For these, after all, are the big things, the elemental things, of
life. They are the basic things which leave scant room for the
momentary fripperies and the hand-made ornaments of existence....

Heigho! I seem to grow into a melancholy Jacques with the advancing
years. That's the way of life, I suppose. But I've no intention of
throwing up the sponge. If I can no longer get as much fun out of the
game as I want, I can at least watch my offspring taking their joy out
of it. God be thanked for giving us our children! We can still rest
our tired old eyes on them, just as the polisher of precious stones
used to keep an emerald in front of him, to relieve his strained
vision by gazing at its soft and soothing greenness.

I have just crept in to take a look at my precious Dinkie, fast asleep
in the old cast-iron crib that is growing so small for him he has to
lie catercornered on his mattress. He seemed so big, stretched out
there, that he frightened me with the thought he couldn't be a child
much longer. There are no babies left now in my home circle. And I
still have a shamefaced sort of hankering to hold a baby in my arm