"Show him the spiced plums, mother. Americans don't have those," said one
of the older boys. "Mother uses them to make kolaches," he added.
Leo, in a low voice, tossed off some scornful remark in Bohemian.
I turned to him. "You think I don't know what kolaches are, eh? You're
mistaken, young man. I've eaten your mother's kolaches long before that
Easter day when you were born."
"Always too fresh, Leo," Ambrosch remarked with a shrug.
Leo dived behind his mother and grinned out at me.
We turned to leave the cave; Antonia and I went up the stairs first, and
the children waited. We were standing outside talking, when they all came
running up the steps together, big and little, tow heads and gold heads
and brown, and flashing little naked legs; a veritable explosion of life
out of the dark cave into the sunlight. It made me dizzy for a moment.
The boys escorted us to the front of the house, which I had n't yet seen;
in farmhouses, somehow, life comes and goes by the back door. The roof was
so steep that the eaves were not much above the forest of tall hollyhocks,
now brown and in seed. Through July, Antonia said, the house was buried in
them; the Bohemians, I remembered, always planted hollyhocks. The front
yard was enclosed by a thorny locust hedge, and at the gate grew two
silvery, moth-like trees of the mimosa family. From here one looked down
over the cattle yards, with their two long ponds, and over a wide stretch
of stubble which they told me was a rye-field in summer.
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