WEED SEEDS

Jenny was strolling around in the yard north of the house one morning. in April. She walked among the sour dock which grew as high as her head It was like being in a forest. As she pulled off a long green leaf, she noticed the clusters of seeds on the sour dock. They were starting to turn brown. She decided to pick some for her playhouse. She could play that the seeds were cereal.

Jenny went to the empty cans Mother had thrown away behind the chicken house. She selected a large Hershey’s cocoa can and decided it would do. She took the can and went back to the weed forest and began sliding off handfuls of seeds into the cocoa can. She made plans to feed the seeds to her “children,” two old dolls that had been relegated to the playhouse.

“Now eat your cereal,” she would say, “or Mama will have to spank.” Jenny had never been spanked for not eating food, but she knew of children who had. It would turn out that the “children” wouldn’t want their cereal. She would turn each one across her knee and spank them. How the children would cry. Then she would say sternly, “Hush now, or Mama will give you something more to bawl about.” When the cocoa can was heaped full, she took it to her outdoor playhouse in an abandoned hog house and set it in her orange crate cupboard.

She felt thirsty and tired, so she went to the house and dipped a dipper full of water from the water pail, taking deep gulps of water and letting the dipper drip on the kitchen floor. Mother had made chocolate pie for dinner and had saved the pan for Jenny to scrape out with a spoon. It always tasted much better this way than it ever did in the pie. She sometimes wondered who scraped out the cake and pie bowls and pans in homes where there were no children.

Soon after dinner that noon, Jenny’s hands and fingers felt hot and itchy. She saw that they were covered with little red pimples.

“Look here, “ she said to Daddy, and spread her hands out before him. Daddy called Mother’s attention to the spots. They wanted to know where she had been playing that morning.

“I slid brown seeds from those tall weeds north of the house into a cocoa can ,” she told them

“You didn’t eat any, did you?”

“No, of course not. They were pretend food for my old dolls in the playhouse.”
They told her this was sour dock and that she should stay out of it. Then Mother made a smooth white paste from baking soda and water and put it on Jenny’s hands and fingers . It felt cool and soothing and made the itching stop for a while. Whenever it began to itch again, Mother would put on more paste. By evening, the spots were gone.

Jenny thought about the cocoa can with the weed seeds in it. Tomorrow she was going to dump them in the ditch. They wouldn’t have been good for her “children” anyhow.