"Cather, Willa - O Pioneers!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

John Bergson had married beneath him, but
he had married a good housewife. Mrs. Berg-
son was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy
and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was
something comfortable about her; perhaps it
was her own love of comfort. For eleven years
she had worthily striven to maintain some sem-
blance of household order amid conditions that
made order very difficult. Habit was very
strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting
efforts to repeat the routine of her old life among
new surroundings had done a great deal to keep
the family from disintegrating morally and get-
ting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had
a log house, for instance, only because Mrs.
Bergson would not live in a sod house. She
missed the fish diet of her own country, and
twice every summer she sent the boys to the
river, twenty miles to the southward, to fish
for channel cat. When the children were little
she used to load them all into the wagon, the
baby in its crib, and go fishing herself.

Alexandra often said that if her mother were
cast upon a desert island, she would thank God
for her deliverance, make a garden, and find
something to preserve. Preserving was almost
a mania with Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was,
she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek
looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a
wild creature in search of prey. She made a yel-
low jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew
on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and
she made a sticky dark conserve of garden toma-
toes. She had experimented even with the rank
buffalo-pea, and she could not see a fine bronze
cluster of them without shaking her head and
murmuring, "What a pity!" When there was
nothing more to preserve, she began to pickle.
The amount of sugar she used in these processes
was sometimes a serious drain upon the family
resources. She was a good mother, but she was
glad when her children were old enough not to
be in her way in the kitchen. She had never
quite forgiven John Bergson for bringing her
to the end of the earth; but, now that she was
there, she wanted to be let alone to reconstruct
her old life in so far as that was possible. She
could still take some comfort in the world if
she had bacon in the cave, glass jars on the