Mr. Wilke had a good big onion field down on the bottom land near the river. It was sandy ground, and the sun made it as hot as a frying pan. And it seemed as though those onions had to be weeded on the very hottest days. Sometimes I used to tell myself it really was a frying pan, and that I was the egg on it. I could almost feel my outside edges turning brown and curling up. It wasn’t too bad for me, though. Once in a while I could get a whiff of cool air from the river. It was Grace and Mother who really got the worst of it. A good many of the ladies in Littleton must have stopped cooking altogether, and the hotter it got the bigger my cookery orders grew. I didn’t have sense enough to tell people I’d taken all the orders Mother could bake, and the third Wednesday in July I came home with a list as long as my arm. Mother started baking early Friday morning, and I don’t believe she’d stopped for a wink of sleep till I came home Saturday noon to take the stuff out.
