by Ralph Moody
Mother seemed as happy about Grace’s getting the baskets as Grace was herself. Her eyes sparkled just as much, and she was telling us about her very first May basket when Philip said he was going to the kitchen for a drink of water. He wasn’t gone more than a minute before our bell rang again, and that time we all made Mother go to answer the door. Before she had time to get back Philip had run around to the kitchen door and come in. He was bouncing up and down in his chair when Mother came back to the parlor with a big smile on her face. She held the pretty basket out toward Grace and said, “Another basket for you, Gracie. My, you must be the most popular girl in town!”
“Oh, no!” Grace said. “No boy would ever hang a basket as fancy as that one to anybody but his very best girl, and I’m nobody’s very best girl. Look and see what it says on the card.”
Mother looked a little puzzled for a second, but I think she guessed from the looks on our faces that we knew something about the basket. She sat down on the edge of her chair, set the basket on her knees, and took the card out. She had only glanced at it when she jumped up, dropping basket, card, and all. She was half laughing and half crying as she ran across to Philip’s chair, dropped down on her knees, and hugged him up tight to her. While she was loving him I picked up the card she’d dropped. Philip had printed on it:
To MARY EMMA
FROM HER BEST LOVER
As soon as Mother could talk, she brushed the tears away from her eyes and said, “Oh, children, hasn’t the Lord been good to us! Just think of it! At the first of January we left Colorado, not knowing where we’d find a place to lay our heads, or if we’d ever again have good friends and a home we could call our own. And here it is only May.” Then she hugged Philip to her again.
About the Author
RALPH OWEN MOODY was born December 16, 1898, in Rochester, N. H. His father was a farmer whose illness forced the family to move to Colorado when Ralph was eight years old. The family’s life in the new surroundings is told from the point of view of the boy himself in Little Britches (1950).
The farm failed and the family moved into Littleton, Colorado, when Ralph was about eleven. Soon after, the elder Moody died of pneumonia, leaving Ralph as the oldest boy, the man of the family. After a year or so—described in Man of the Family (1951) and The Home Ranch (1956)—Mrs. Moody brought her three sons and three daughters back to Medford, Mass., where Ralph completed his formal education through the eighth grade of grammar school. This is the period of Mary Emma & Company (1961). Later, Ralph joined his maternal grandfather on his farm in Maine—the period covered in The Fields of Home (1953).
In spite of his farming experience, Ralph Moody was not destined to be a farmer. He abandoned the land because his wife was determined to raise her family (they have three children) in the city. He completed his high-school studies in the evening and continued his education in university extension classes.
“When I was twenty-one,” he writes, “I got a diary as a birthday present and I wrote in it that I was going to work as hard as I could, save fifty thousand dollars by the time I was fifty, and then start writing.” True to his word, he did start writing on the night of his fiftieth birthday.
—Adapted from the Wilson Library Bulletin