"Tuck Everlasting" by Natalie Babbitt, Chapters 6–11

Mae Tuck’s round face wrinkled in dismay.

“Dear Lord, don’t cry! Please don’t cry, child!” she implored.

That tree hadn’t grown one whit in all that time. It was exactly the same.

Closing the gate on her oldest fears as she had closed the gate of her own fenced yard, she discovered the wings she’d always wished she had. And all at once she was elated.

Her mother’s voice, the feel of home, receded for the moment, and her thoughts turned forward.

The pastures, fields, and scrubby groves they crossed were vigorous with bees, and crickets leapt before them as if each step released a spring and flung them up like pebbles.

But everything else was motionless, dry as biscuit, on the brink of burning, hoarding final reservoirs of sap, trying to hold out till the rain returned, and Queen Anne’s lace lay dusty on the surface of the meadows like foam on a painted sea.

The late sun’s brilliance could penetrate only in scattered glimmers, and everything was silent and untouched, the ground muffled with moss and sliding needles, the graceful arms of the pines stretched out protectively in every direction.

The Foster women had made a fortress out of duty. Within it, they were indomitable.

The kitchen came first, with an open cabinet where dishes were stacked in perilous towers without the least regard for their varying
dimensions.

The parlor came next, where the furniture, loose and sloping with age, was set about helter-skelter.

Beyond this was the bedroom, where a vast and tipsy brass bed took up most of the space, but there was room beside it for the washstand with the lonely mirror, and opposite its foot a cavernous oak wardrobe from which leaked the faint smell of camphor.

For, on the old beamed ceiling of the parlor, streaks of light swam and danced and wavered like a bright mirage, reflected through the windows from the sunlit surface of the pond.

It was a whole new idea to her that people could live in such disarray, but at the same time she was charmed.

It was all right, then, to lick the maple syrup from your fingers. Winnie was never allowed to do such a thing at home, but she had always thought it would be the easiest way. And suddenly the meal seemed luxurious.