“I don’t hear it,” say Mom as she takes the pan of water across the dogtrot toward the kitchen.
“You will hear it in a few minutes,” says Pa. “It’s like potato wagons rolling across the far shies.”
“Third time is the charm foe me,” says Mom as she returns from the kitchen without the washpan. “Even since I can remember, the third time has been the charm for me. I can remember once setting a hen on guinea eggs. A blacksnake that you kept in the corncrib crawled through a crack to my hen’s nest. He crawled under the hen and swallowed the eggs. He was so full of eggs that when he tried to crawl out of the nest he fell to the ground. I saw him fall with his sides bulged in and out like wild frostbitten snowballs. I took a hoe and clipped his head. Then I set my hen on goose eggs and soon as they hatched, my old hen pinched their necks with her bill like you’d do with a pair of scissor. I set her on her own kind of eggs-and she hatched every one of the eggs and raised all her biddies. Third time was the charm.”