The big pine was good for one thing, anyhow, if it did keep the house as dark as a cellar with the black shade it made.  The side-porch was nice and cool even on a hot summer day, just right for making butter.  If it wasn’t for the horrid pitch-piny smell the tree wouldn’t be so bad.  The churning was getting along fine too.  The dasher was beginning to go the blob-blob way that showed in a minute or two the butter would be there.  It had been a real good idea to get up early and get the work out of the way so that the churning could be done before it got so hot.  A thunder-storm was coming, too, probably.  You could feel it in the air.  There, perhaps the butter had come, now.  Nelly pushed the dasher down slowly and drew it back with care, turning her ear to listen expertly to the sound it made.  No, not yet, there wasn’t that watery splash yet that came after it had separated.

She went on with the regular rhythmic motion, her eyes fixed dreamily on the round hole in the cover of the churn, through which the dasher-handle went up and down and which was now rimmed with thick yellow cream.  She loved to churn, Nelly thought.  She loved to have milk to look out for, anyhow, from the time it came in from the barn, warm and foamy and sweet-smelling, till the time when she had taken off the thick, sour cream, like shammy-skin, and then poured the loppered milk spatteringly into the pigs’ trough.  She liked seeing how the pigs loved it, sucking it up, their eyes half shut because it tasted so good.  There wasn’t anything that was better than giving people or animals what they liked to eat.  It made her feel good all over to throw corn to the hens and see how they scrabbled for it.  She just loved to get a bag of stick candy at the store, when she went to town, and see how Addie and Ralph and little ’Gene jumped up and down when they saw it.

And then it was so nice to be fore-handed and get the churning out of the way before noon.  She would have time this afternoon after the dishes were done, to sit right down with that sprigged calico dress for little Addie.  She could get the seams all run up on the machine before supper-time, and have the hand-work, buttonholes and finishing, for pick-up work for odd minutes.  She just loved to sit and sew, in a room all nice and picked up, and know the house-work was done.

That would be a real pretty dress, she thought, with the pink sprigs and the pink feather-stitching in mercerized cotton she was going to put on it.  Addie would look sweet in it.  And if it was washed careful and dried in the shade it wouldn’t fade so much.  It was a good bright pink to start with.  Only Addie ought to have a new hat to wear with it.  A white straw with pink flowers on it.  But that would cost a couple of dollars, anyhow, everything was so dear now.  Oh well, ’Gene would let her buy it.  ’Gene would let her do most anything.