The Mother by Pearl S. Buck

In the kitchen of the small thatched farmhouse the mother sat on a low bamboo stool behind the earthen stove and fed grass deftly into the hole where a fire burned beneath the iron cauldron. The blaze was but just caught and she moved a twig here, a handful of leaves there, and thrust in a fresh bit of the dried grass she had cut from the hillsides last autumn. In the corner of the kitchen as near as she could creep to the fire sat a very old and weazened woman, wrapped in a thick padded coat of bright red cotton stuff, whose edges showed under a patched coat of blue she wore over it. She was half blind with a sore disease of the eyes, and this had well-nigh sealed her eyelids together. But through the small slits left open she could see a great deal still, and she watched the flare of the flames as they leaped and caught under the strong and skillful hands of the mother. Now she said, her words hissing softly through her sunken, toothless gums, "Be careful how you feed the fire -- there is only that one load -- is it two? -- and the spring is but newly come and we have long to go before the grass is long enough to cut and here I am as I am and I doubt I can ever go again and pick a bit of fuel -- a useless old crone now, who ought to die -- "

These last words the old woman said many times a day and every time she said them she waited to hear the son's wife speak as she now did, "Do not say it, old mother! What would we do if we had not you to watch the door while we are in the field and see that the little ones do not fall into the pond?"