tails in the ashes
for you?) And there were crullers. No, I don't mean "doughnuts." I mean
crullers, all twisted up. They go good with cider. (Sometimes my grandma
cut out thin, pallid little men of cruller dough, and dropped them into
the hot lard for my Uncle Jimmy and me. And when she fished them out,
they were all swelled up and "pussy," and golden brown).

And there was pie. Neither at the school nooning nor at the table did
one put a piece of pie upon a plate and haggle at it with a fork. You
took the piece of pie up in your hand and pointed the sharp end toward
you, and gently crowded it into your face. It didn't require much
pressure either.

And there were always apples, real apples. I think they must make apples
in factories nowadays. They taste like it. These were real ones, picked
off the trees. Out at grandpap's they had bellflowers, and winesaps, and
seek-no-furthers, and, I think, sheep-noses, and one kind of apple that
I can't find any more, though I have sought it carefully. It was the
finest apple I ever set a tooth in. It was the juiciest and the spiciest
apple. It had sort of a rollicking flavor to it, if you know what I
mean. It certainly was the ne plus ultra of an apple. And the name of it
was the rambo. Dear me, how good it was! think I'd sooner have one right
now than great riches. And all these apples they kept in the apple-hole.
You went out and uncovered the earth and there they were, all in a big
nest of straw; and such a gush of perfume distilled from that pile of
them that just to recollect it makes my mouth all wet.

They had a big red apple in those days that I forget the name of. Oh, it
was a whopper! You'd nibble at it and nibble at it before you could
get a purchase on it. Then, after you got your teeth in, you'd pull and
pull, and all of a sudden the apple would go "tock!" and your head would
fly back from the recoil, and you had a bite about the size of your
hand. You "chomped" on it, with your cheek all bulged out, and blame
near drowned yourself with the juice of it.

Noon-time the girls used to count the seeds:

"One I love, two I love, three my love I see;
Four I love with all my heart, and five I cast away.
Six he loves; seven she loves; eight... eight..."

I forget what eight is, and all that follows after. And then the others
would tease her with, "Aw, Jennie!" knowing who it was she had named
the apple for, Wes. Rinehart, or 'Lonzo Curl, or whoever. And