In Grandma's Attic Read Free

enough.”
    With great excitement we were dressed and wrapped warmly for the trip. The snow had stopped and the stars were beginning to come out when we reached the Carters’. I don’t remember much about the evening, aside from hearing the singing and talking, for I went to sleep on Ma’s lap before it was time to go home.
    Ma told me later what happened that night that made it so memorable for her. When they were ready to leave, Ma put my coat and bonnet on me, and Pa wrapped me in a big quilt. Then he put me in the sleigh with the boys, where I continued to sleep during the ride home.
    I can remember waking and seeing a light shining from the cabin door. I climbed out of the sleigh and headed straight for my bed. I slept in the trundle bed that slid under Ma’s bed. Normally it was pulled out at night for me, but since we had been away all evening, my bed was not ready. This made no difference to me; I just climbed in with my clothes on and promptly fell asleep again.
    No one had seen me enter the cabin. Roy had gone to shut the gate, Reuben was helping Pa unhitch the horse, and Ma had returned to the front of the sleigh to get the blanket and warming brick she and Pa had used. After putting these things in the cabin, Ma returned to the sleigh to get me.
    She reached into the straw and pulled the quilt toward her. It was empty!
    “Pa!” she called frantically. “Pa, Mabel isn’t here!”
    Pa ran to the sleigh.
    “Now, Maryanne,” he said, “she has to be there. Where else would she be?”
    He climbed into the sleigh and held the lantern high while he looked through the straw. Ma pulled the quilt out and began to shake it, as though she might have overlooked me in the dark. As she did so, my red bonnet fell out on the snow.
    “Oh, Pa,” she wailed. “Here’s Mabel’s bonnet. Now I know we’ve lost her. She must have fallen out of the sleigh along the road somewhere. We’ll have to go back and look for her.”
    The boys stood silently by as Ma continued to shake the quilt, and Pa felt around through the straw. “Didn’t you boys watch out for your sister?” he asked them. “Didn’t you see her when she fell out?”
    They shook their heads dumbly, and Roy began to cry. Reuben protested that I couldn’t have fallen out; he surely would have seen me fall.
    Finally Pa told Ma to get the boys to bed. He said he would go back over the road and search for me. When the boys were in bed, Ma began to walk back and forth across the little cabin, clutching my red bonnet and praying that the Lord would help Pa find me before I froze to death.
    When Pa returned home much later and reported that there was no sign of me, Ma was in despair. Pa had gone back to the Carters’, and Brother Carter and his boys were joining in the search. With lanterns swinging, the men tramped through the ditches beside the road, calling my name. When they had finally covered all the ground several times, they came back to the cabin to decide what was to be done.
    Ma had fixed hot coffee, and they sat around the fire, warming their feet and hands before starting out again.
    “Well,” Pa said, “we’ll just have to trust the Lord to take care of her. I can’t imagine where we could have lost her. I know she was in the sleigh when we left for home.”
    About that time I must have awakened and heard voices, for I crawled out from under the big bed to see what was going on. Ma and Pa stared in disbelief when they saw me, still dressed in my red coat, standing in the middle of the cabin. Of course I had no explanation. I had been sleepy and had gone to bed. It was as simple as that to me. The relieved Carters left for their long ride home, and Ma put me back to bed.
    It was a long time before Ma or Pa could see the funny side of that evening. They made sure it never happened again by keeping me in front with them whenever we went somewhere in the sleigh. But in later years they laughed about the night I “fell out of the sleigh” and