Part Two - The Soul of Nelly Powers

July 20.

The big pine was good for one thing, anyhow, if it did keep the house as
dark as a cellar with the black shade it made. The side-porch was nice
and cool even on a hot summer day, just right for making butter. If it
wasn't for the horrid pitch-piny smell the tree wouldn't be so bad. The
churning was getting along fine too. The dasher was beginning to go the
blob-blob way that showed in a minute or two the butter would be there.
It had been a real good idea to get up early and get the work out of the
way so that the churning could be done before it got so hot. A
thunder-storm was coming, too, probably. You could feel it in the air.
There, perhaps the butter had come, now. Nelly pushed the dasher down
slowly and drew it back with care, turning her ear to listen expertly to
the sound it made. No, not yet, there wasn't that watery splash yet that
came after it had separated.

She went on with the regular rhythmic motion, her eyes fixed dreamily on
the round hole in the cover of the churn, through which the
dasher-handle went up and down and which was now rimmed with thick
yellow cream. She loved to churn, Nelly thought. She loved to have milk
to look out for, anyhow, from the time it came in from the barn, warm
and foamy and sweet-smelling, till the time when she had taken off the
thick, sour cream, like shammy-skin, and then poured the loppered milk
spatteringly into the pigs' trough. She liked seeing how the pigs loved
it, sucking it up, their eyes half shut because it tasted so good. There
wasn't anything that was better than giving people or animals what they
liked to eat. It made her feel good all over to throw corn to the hens
and see how they scrabbled for it. She just loved to get a bag of stick
candy at the store, when she went to town, and see how Addie and Ralph
and little 'Gene jumped up and down when they saw it.