After all, she could turn a hunk of pumpkin into pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin custard, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin bread, and pumpkin fritters. Terpsichore’s father said she was a wizard with pumpkins. After several more blows, she finally hacked off a section light enough to carry into the kitchen. The strike vibrated up her arms and clear through her shoulders to her jaws. She raised the hatchet over her head and heaved it down with the full weight of her seventy-three pounds behind it. She would not have to attack that monster pumpkin like a lumberjack. If Terpsichore had not made that foolish bargain with her mother, she could have been inside with her sisters, warm. It snatched notes from her sisters’ piano duet, which escaped through the crack in the parlor window and swirled up to meet the chimney smoke. The wind howled and whipped her skirt around her knees. She stumbled over an icy hillock of mud where her mother’s roses had been uprooted to make way for potatoes. It was because Terpsichore was the only unmusical Johnson that she dragged a hatchet across the yard toward a pumpkin as big as a pickle barrel. November, 1934-Little Bear Lake, Wisconsin
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