Who
can look at a great bed of red and pink and lavender and
yellow tulips and hyacinths, and doubt it? Come."
With a quick gesture she threw a shawl over her head,
and beckoned me. Together we stepped out into the chill
of the raw March afternoon. She stood a moment, silent,
gazing over the sodden earth. Then she flitted swiftly
down the narrow path, and halted before a queer little
structure of brick, covered with the skeleton of a
creeping vine. Stooping, Alma Pflugel pulled open the
rusty iron door and smiled up at me.
"This was my grandmother's oven. All her bread she
baked in this little brick stove. Black bread it was,
with a great thick crust, and a bitter taste. But it was
sweet, too. I have never tasted any so good. I like to
think of Grossmutter, when she was a bride, baking her
first batch of bread in this oven that Grossvater built
for her. And because the old oven was so very difficult
to manage, and because she was such a young thing--only
sixteen!--I like to think that her first loaves were
perhaps not so successful, and that Grosspapa joked about
them, and that the little bride wept, so that the young
husband had to kiss away the tears."
She shut the rusty, sagging door very slowly and
gently.
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