Full Speed Ahead: My Journey with Kit

We arrive at a tidy cabin among pine trees. Kit runs ahead, and a spry white-haired lady comes out and swings her around. Buddy dances at her feet while Eli coos in Mrs. Littlefield’s arms.

The lady, Aunt Millie, wasn’t expecting such a surprise and marvels at how fat and sassy Eli has grown. Mrs. Littlefield worries she’ll have to wrap him in her feather quilt once the weather turns, since he’s outgrown his winter clothes.

Aunt Millie invites everyone inside, but Mrs. Littlefield declines, a cow needs milking, and heads down the hill. Aunt Millie looks over Kit, Buddy, and me, footsore and muddy, jokes that Shakespeare would say we look like we’ve come from “the edge of doom,” and invites us in to clean up.

The cabin is nothing like Mom’s and my apartment, tidy but overflowing with potted plants, stacked books, maps, and quilt-covered chairs. A tall woman, Miss Myrtle, greets us in a twangy voice and offers to ride Serena into town to phone Kit’s parents that we’re here.

I ask if Serena is Myrtle’s car’s name, and everyone laughs. Serena’s her mule. Kit adds Myrtle will have to phone the neighbors, since the Kittredges’ own phone got turned off after Dad lost his job.

Kit and I watch Myrtle saddle Serena, a mule bigger than I expected, though Buddy scampers fearlessly at her feet like old friends. Serena hee-haws once, and they set off.

After Myrtle leaves, Aunt Millie gives us honey-scented soap and rough linen towels to scrub clean, then washes our clothes and hangs them on the line. She lends us light, cool dresses, plus soft knitted socks for our blistered feet.

We sit in the shade on handmade quilts, eating green salad with tomatoes and relish from hand-carved bowls. I ask if Aunt Millie and Myrtle made them. Aunt Millie shakes her head. The womenfolk around here made everything, most as gifts, some traded for favors.

Money was scarce here even before the Depression, and scarcer now. People take pride in trading their creations for favors rather than cash, like Mrs. Littlefield’s dried apple slices.

Reminded of Mrs. Littlefield, Kit and I recount how we found her cabin, the waterfall, the train, the railroad bulls, Mr. Birdseye. Aunt Millie nods. Folks have lost plenty in the Depression, but men like Birdseye prove kindness isn’t gone. When the coal mines closed, the miners lost their jobs, her school shut down, and since her house was tied to the school, she lost that, too, so Myrtle took her in. But whining is like giving a wristwatch to a hog, a waste of time.

Afterward, we head to the schoolhouse, where Aunt Millie says there are books to borrow. While she dusts the windows, Kit and I browse the shelf, and I pull out a scrapbook, the Waste-Not, Want-Not Almanac, full of handwritten recipes and tips on gardening, sewing, and preserves, plus plant sketches and blank pages left for new ideas.

I ask who made it. Aunt Millie smiles, Kit did, a terrific book of penny-pinching, Depression-beating advice. Kit says Aunt Millie taught her everything she knows: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

It makes Aunt Millie mad as a hornet to see books gathering dust, she says. A book is like a brain, it needs use. Kit wonders if they could turn the schoolhouse into a library where people could borrow books.

I love the idea, but Aunt Millie says it’s impractical. Since the mine closed, most men left to find work elsewhere, and the old folks, women, and children left behind are scattered and too busy tending crops and animals to come borrow books.

Still, Kit and I are determined. If we can find a way to get books to people instead, we could fight back against the Depression and make lives a little better.