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them here, too, made it seem like there was a thread strung out between me and Grammy.
    I gazed out at the gardens and barn and chicken coop, the pointy-topped hemlock and the meadow rolling down toward town. Maybe today I’d try to coax our new cats out from the shadows in the barn. Yesterday Daddy had gotten two—one gray and one black—from a man at the farmers’ market. Daddy wanted them to keep the mice down, but I wanted them just for themselves. So far I’d hardly caught sight of them, but Mama said if I was patient they’d lose their shyness.
    But that would be later. First I had to let the chickens out and clean the nest boxes. Then maybe I’d walk to the woods. I could make it a nature walk, which Grammy and I did pretty often as part of my schooling. There was a little twisty-armed shrub along the lane. If I took a tree guide, maybe I could learn its name. I could draw a picture of it and write a poem, too. Mama had me doing haiku lately.
    Small twisty-armed shrub
would do for the first line, I thought as I rifled through my bureau drawer, looking for my favorite shirt. I’d worn it so much, it was soft and thin and had a hole under the arm, but I wouldn’t let Mama get rid of it.
Along the lane to the woods.
What name do you use?
    I found my shirt and pulled it on, still planning. Maybe I’d take my BB gun. It was my daddy’s when he was a boy, and pretty often I did target practice on a bale of straw he set up for me in the pasture. I liked to take aim and hit the bull’s-eye.You never know when a skill like that could come in handy—if a coyote went after my chickens, for example, though I don’t know how I’d ever have the heart to pull the trigger. For my chickens, I guess I’d have to. Mostly I liked to pretend I was a girl from olden times, living in a cabin with her folks and her grandma. Pretty often I added a sister or an orphan we’d adopted into the story too. I’d pretend a band of robbers had come to the door, and there I was, ready to defend us.
    I thought I’d pack a lunch too. After lunch, I’d do my inside lessons—math and composition today—and write to Grammy. I’d tell her about selling my eggs, and the class Mama was going to teach, and the coyotes. I’d remind her of the story she always told me when we went outside to see the stars at night, of how Coyote led four wolves into the sky and left them there to make the Big Dipper. She’d like that I remembered.
    I hurried downstairs to get started.
    Mama had fixed oatmeal for breakfast, which is not my favorite, even with maple syrup on it. I got through it by eating as quick as I could, and was set to take my bowl to the sink and head to the henhouse when Daddy said, “Hold on a minute, chicklet.”
    Something in his tone of voice alerted me. “What?” I said, feeling wary.
    “Your mama and I have something to talk over with you.”
    That didn’t sound like good news. They didn’t have anything to talk over either. “Talk over” sounds like you can put your twocents in, but instead they had something to tell me. They had decided I should go to school.
    You could have knocked me over with the smallest, downiest chicken feather. I could not imagine a worse idea. Mrs. Perkins’s kids back home went to school and they’d told me plenty about it. In school you were trapped inside all day, and you had to sit still in a chair, and you had to learn by memorizing textbooks instead of reading all the interesting books Grammy used with me. There’d be no more wandering the fields and the woods whenever I wanted, no more going to the farmers’ markets except on the weekend, no more checking for eggs at noon as well as in the morning and at night. The shape of my days would be ruined. And the kids would be like the Perkins kids—rowdy and wearing. Worse than that, they’d be mean. I had read plenty of books and I knew. Kids don’t like kids who are different. I was from North Carolina and had never attended school,