Still grouchy but this letter of Ma's is sprightly and bright so I'll copy it from the original handwritten letter to one of her younger sisters written perhaps around 1937 or so . . .

Hello little one,
It seems ages since I've written to you.  It is too. Do you remember whether I promised you snapshots of the fish pool, 'Dicky cat' and Lucky's trained mosquito or was it merely a possibility of taking said snapshots and sending same to you?  Well, be it as it may, the mosquito has died a well-earned, though inglorious death, the cat is too fat and lazy to even pose for the camera, 'Dicky' has been given to Louis because he destroyed and killed everything in our prized fish-pool! Papa, you recall, was gone one month (with Jenny) and during the day Annette, who cared for Dicky, let him loose several hours daily.  Dicky developed a particular yen for bathing and this craze he indulged to his heart's content in our fish pool.  The cat-o-nines, pickerel plants, rice plants, floating elodea, pond lilies, etc, were no match for Dicky's vigorous splashings and his "I'm-out, you're-in-game" with Gertrude Bernard's big dog "Stubby." Next spring we'll have to start all over again and believe me we'll make darn sure there are no dogs around to mess it.

What with teaching besides all your studies, you certainly are one busy youngster. Try and not overdo it, old top, remember you are still in your 'teens.' Lucky and I have been working on the average about seventy hours a week on those blooming town reports.  The money was quite welcomed but it is much too much for me and last weekend I was compelled to lay low.  We even worked Sundays!  Mrs. Burgess would have passed out had she known! You know, sis, Papa got thirty bushels of potatoes to one bushel of seeding.  One potato (we sent to Mrs. O...) weighed one pound, ten ounces and another, one pound, nine ounces and I. . . writes that they were perfectly sound and not hollow.  Is Pa strutting around.  All the other gardeners around complain of poor crops. Papa had lovely tomatoes, delicious corn (we sent ten dozen ears to Mrs. O...) and his flowers were the envy of the neighborhood. Boy, he's O.K., no wonder Jenny wanted to take him to Chicago with her.