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Arranged along the alleys in the proportion of one to every house were rows of small structures that an anthropologist, if a stranger in the land, might have supposed were shrines. If they were shrines, then we were vandals, because on Halloween we used to discommode the town by roving all the alleys, tipping over every little house we found unguarded. Surely those pranks disqualified any member of our gang from ever being accepted as a hero of the Horatio Alger pattern. My sole excuse for such behavior is that when we came home on Sundays from the Methodist Church, my mother always said, "Take off those clothes." Probably, with the clothes I stripped off something of the spirit.

Since my mother made practically all the clothes we wore, this was her right; she knitted our socks, she made our shirts and made my sister's dresses, and when I was big enough to assert a need to have my legs incased in long pants, she took an old pair of my father's, opened up the seams, turned them upside down when she cut them to my measure, and then, wrong side out, made me a pair that I was proud to wear. Oh, she had a lot to do to keep us clad and fed. We ate enormously, like famished demons. All day Saturday she baked, and so, for help, she required that whole day out of Ed's life and mine. Of course, when I got into high school, Ed had been emancipated from home into a job.