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"Spring is not meant to be cold." This is what Ella thought wow gold as she bent over and picked up the sleeping stones she had placed outside several days ago. The way the sun was shining made her feel as if the season was being cheated. She moved from stone to stone with a vague feeling of anger; some watery form of injustice.
"Where is the spring?" she thought again, picking up another slab.
While she was thus engaged in this somewhat depressing activity, a black shadow slid near her, abruptly soaking up the brilliant sunshine. The shadow took on the oblong shape of a man; a somewhat overweight and short man, with hair that struck out wildly from one side of his head like a snake lashing out.
Ella noted the arrival but did not bend from the task of gathering the flat, slate-like pieces of rock into a large wicker basket, which increasingly bowed under the weight of each individual stone and creaked in protest. She was his opposite in physical appearance (and other ways, too), being tall and relatively frail, yet he offered no help.
Instead, he spoke in a gruff, almost animal voice. "I told you, Ellie, it was too early to turn the stones out. Didn't I tell 'e? I like to have froze last night..."
In this part of Kentucky, between the Cumberland River and the descent to bluegrass, turning the sleeping stones out was a symbolic concession to the coming of spring. Older women insisted that the stones would maintain their heat better if they basked in the blazing summer sunshine until the next fall.
Ella, for reasons even she didn't fully understand, was anxious for summer to arrive. Perhaps too anxious, as it turned out.
"You're right," she said quickly, although her voice most plainly bespoke of some other emotion than pleasant agreement, and her hands quickened their pace in sympathy to that feeling. "I'll get your breakfast so you can get to work on the corn beside the creek."
The man grunted in response, pushing a dirty hand through the recalcitrant black hair on his head, then disappeared inside the small frame farmhouse. Ella picked up the last sleeping stone and held it in her hand. Why was spring so reluctant this year? Surely enduring such a miserable, starving winter entitled them to decent planting weather. The stone in her hand was unreadable.
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