Anyway, school got to be more fun for Millie. She had been a leader since first grade - not that she tried to be; she just was. Her intelligence; her quick wit; her ready smile; her friendly, kind but steadfast nature and her rather mature wisdom, even at age six, had not allowed her to be other than a leader and she had accepted her role graciously. She was in no way authoritarian but other kids just did what she did and looked to her to make decisions for the group. That annoyed Millie some. Why did she always have to decide? But it annoyed her more to just stand there seeing everyone with blank looks on their faces. They all seemed too shy - or too afraid that no one would agree with them - to make a decision. Millie was a doer, not a stand-arounder, so eventually she'd make the decision for the group.
Millie wasn't always the best at everything. Freddy beat her in the sixth grade spelling bee. Now, that annoyed her. Getting beat by a boy and to top it off - by her brother! She hated that smirk of Freddy's and she couldn't even beat him up anymore. Not that she ever really did but she had hit him hard enough plenty of times that Freddy was very judicious in his use of that smirk on her.
Janet Hartley sometimes got better math grades than either Millie or Freddy and Janet was kind of stuck-up about it. When she beat either one of them she'd go around telling kids that, "Those Ferman kids think they're so smart." Didn't bother the Fermans. They got good grades because they'd been taught to do their best, not to show-off.
Millie was generally a happy girl even if life did have its trials for an eleven-year-old girl. But among those trials there were bright spots in this sibling thing. Millie usually got better test grades in language and social studies and she usually wouldn't give Freddy the satisfaction of smirking at him in those subjects. She could smirk at him if she had a mind to but rarely did. She was, after all, a young lady. She would not stoop to the level of a "child." It made no difference that Freddy frequently reminded her that he was ten minutes older. Millie was a young lady and - ten minutes or ten days - Freddy was a child. All boys were children!
She loved Freddy. He was her brother. Of course she loved him but why did he annoy her so? He didn't used to. There was a time when she would have probably even thought the feed sack dress with the binder twine lace was really neat but funny things were happening to her lately. Not always. Just sometimes she didn't feel like the same girl anymore.
Little things her mother or dad or Freddy did annoyed her. That stuff never had before. She sometimes felt grouchy. She never sassed her parents but she felt like it sometimes. She worried a little. Was she getting sick?
Actually, Millie knew what was going on. Her mother had had the "talk" with her but Millie was ambivalent. Every kid wants to grow up but Millie like being a little kid too. She wouldn't admit it everywhere but she still loved her dolls. She loved to wrestle with Freddy and she loved to pretend. Millie's problem was that she never knew who was going to wake up in the morning: the young lady or the little kid.
Freddy wouldn't admit it outside his house but he, too, still had fun pretending: playing house with Millie and stuff like that. They'd played house as long as either of them could remember and just weren't ready to quit yet.
They played church too. Freddy was a lousy preacher but it was still fun. It was mostly fun when Lyle and Peggy Craig played with them. Their dad was the real preacher but Lyle was worse at trying to preach than Freddy. Anyway, Lyle would rather tell naughty jokes than play church. The girls never thought of being the preacher. As "militant" as Millie was, it never entered her mind. She just took for granted that preaching was a male function - even in play.
Freddy and Lyle weren't really best friends but the church was on an acre cut out of the corner of the Ferman's farm. The man Grandpa Ferman had bought the farm from had donated the land. That left the Ferman farm with only 179 acres but the land had been donated with the proviso that it reverted to the heirs of whoever owned the farm at the time that acre was no longer used as a church site, so Freddy felt better.
Unless you were really rich, a farm in 1940s Huron County was 180 acres. He knew it was silly but Freddy thought it would make them look "poor" if they didn't own a full 180. He took comfort from the fact that the family still had a hold on that other acre. Things like that mattered to a boy of 11.
Since they lived so close together, Lyle and Freddy played together a lot. Their favorite place to play was along the Pinnebog River, a mile east of their homes. Along the Berne Road, the river ran through a kind of ravine, wooded with hills and creeks and glades - just a great place for eleven-year-old boys to play. There was a lot of pretending done there too. They, of course, played cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, they camped like pioneers - whatever entered the fertile minds of boys - but in the early 1940s you usually fought Germans or Japs. As far as Freddy and Lyle and many other boys were concerned, the Second World War was being won on the banks of the Pinnebog River.
The only time Freddy didn't love the Pinnebog River was when his mother sent him down there to gather butternuts. The gathering wasn't so bad. In fact it was fun. Lyle never went with him to gather butternuts. Lyle didn't want to give his mother any ideas.
The problem with butternuts was cracking them and digging out the meat. They were hard as iron and every year Freddy missed the nut at least once and smashed his finger. You could not think of butternuts without thinking of purple, throbbing fingernails. The nuts weren't even that good. They tasted musty. Freddy was somewhat like his dad. He took things as they came without much emotion but with butternuts he made an exception. He HATED butternuts!