Free Penny by Hal; Borland

the phone. She called Carol. “Penny’s here,” she said. There was a pause. Carol was talking. Then Barbara said, “I think you’d better come and get her,” and she hung up.
    â€œShe says”—Barbara turned to me—“Penny wouldn’t eat her breakfast. They put her outdoors and ten minutes later she was gone. She thought Penny was over here, but she kept thinking she would come home.” She sighed. “She’ll be over.”
    Fifteen minutes later Carol arrived. “I just don’t know what to do if she keeps on like this,” she said. “We’ll have to do something.”
    â€œLet us know,” Barbara said, “if you have to get rid of her. Meanwhile, if she shows up here we’ll feed her and treat her kindly and either take her home or call you to come and get her.”
    â€œI guess that’s all we can do. But I do hate to impose on you.” She left, Pokey-Penny with her, rather shamefaced and sullenly obedient.
    Barbara turned to me. “What else could I do? What else could I have said?”
    â€œNothing. You said the only thing there was to say.”
    Hindsight is easy, I know, and practically infallible. But I still say I knew then that the Pokey-Penny problem wasn’t solved. She was going to be in our lives awhile longer, no matter what we did or said. But for then it was settled and life could go on without her disruptions or distractions.
    The pear tree beside the garden came to dazzling white bloom, ten days ahead of the apple trees. The asparagus finally came up, blue with the cold. Nights persisted chilly, the temperature down in the 30s. We went hopefully down to the lake and found the water there was only 57 degrees. Barbara will swim in water so cold it gives me chilblains just watching her, and she thought, on May 18, with a bright sun and a breeze that had no obvious icicles on it, that she would take her first swim. She got into her suit and I, still fully clothed and wearing a heavy sweater, went down to the dock with her. She sat on the dock and dangled her feet in the water until they turned blue as the dungarees I was wearing.
    â€œIt’s really not very cold,” she said, gripping one hand tightly with the other and practically hunching her shoulders up to her chin. “But,” she said, “I don’t think I’ll go in today. I’ve changed my mind.”
    â€œDarling,” I said, “you have occasional flashes of incredible wisdom. Why don’t we go back to the farm and heat up the pea soup and sit in front of the fire and eat soup. There’s always another day.”
    And, amazingly, that is exactly what we did.
    But on May 27, two weeks late, at least, we had shirtsleeve weather, the lake temperature got up to 60, and Barbara went for her swim. She didn’t swim far, but she went in and swam out and back, and lay in the sun afterward and thawed out and said she was a very brave girl. I said she was not only brave but foolhardy and suggested that she take both antihistamines and antibiotics when we got home. She called me a sissy, which I am, of course. Water colder than 80 degrees is unfit for human occupation, in my estimation, unless one is safely inside a boat that doesn’t leak and cannot be capsized.
    Then we had a summery weekend, really summery, with the air temperature up to 85 and the water temperature all the way up to 70. Morris helped me take the boat down to the lake and launch it, and I went for my first sail of the season. Barbara swam. It was a beautiful weekend.
    And here at the farm summer had arrived. Lilacs were in full bloom, so fragrant we could smell them inside the house, apple blossoms were just past their prime and the petals had begun to fall on the grass like the snow we had had only two or three weeks earlier. The brooksides were purple with violets and the old meadow down the road where it hasn’t been mowed for three years was