The winter that Judith was twelve years old was an unusually bad one. For days the heavy rains fell drearily over the sodden earth. The all-pervading mud went everywhere in the house, in spite of Mrs. Pippinger's housewifely efforts to keep it out. It dried in light gray flakes on the floor, the rungs of chairs, the lower parts of walls and doors and furniture, wherever careless passing feet smeared it off. When Mrs. Pippinger swept it rose in a fine, dry, choking dust that filled the air and then settled thickly on every object in the room. Luella and Lizzie May were kept busy dusting and shaking the dust-filled rags out at the door. The air of the kitchen was damp with steam from wet coats and overalls hung to dry behind the stove. The woodbox was full of sodden, half-rotten fence rails or newly cut green wood, both of which required the greatest coaxing to induce them to burn. Usually the fence rails had to be dried in the oven. They shed rotted scraps over the oven and the floor and the steam of their drying rose up and joined the other exhalations.
When the rain stopped it always turned cold and a piercing, bitter wind came out of the north. For two or three days it stayed cold, then grew mild and cloudy; the wind changed into the south-east and the fine, penetrating rain began all over again.
One bleak, windy day in February the children came home from school to find their mother with a very bad cold. She had done a big washing the day before, had gone out warm from working in the hot suds and got chilled hanging out the clothes in the bitter wind. She was hot and feverish from the cold, her head ached and her chest was tight. Before going to bed Bill made her rub her chest well with skunk grease and take a tablespoonful of castor oil and a good dose of the sugar and vinegar cough mixture.
