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Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, HerselfI expect I might as well begin by telling you all about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle so that whenever I mention her name, which I do very often in this book, you will not interrupt and ask, "Who is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle? What does she look like? How big is she? How old is she? What color is her hair? Is her hair long? Does she wear high heels? Does she have any children? Is there a Mr. Piggle-Wiggle?"
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle lives here in our town. She is very small and has a hump on her back. When children ask her about the hump, she says, "Oh that's a big lump of magic Sometimes it turns me into a witch; other times into a dwarf or a fairy, and on special occasions it makes me into a queen." The children are all very envious of the hump because, besides being magic, it is such a convenient fastening place for wings.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has brown sparkly eyes and brown hair which she keeps very long, almost to her knees, so the children can comb it. She usually wears it on top of her head in a knot, unless someone has been combing it and then she has braids, or long wet curls, or long hair just hanging and with a jewelled crown or flowers on top.
One day I saw her digging in her garden wearing the jewelled crown and with her hair billowing down her back. She waved gaily and said, I promised Betsy (Betsy is one of her children friends) that I would not touch this hair until she came home from school," and she went on with her digging. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's skin is a goldy brown and she has a warm, spicy, sugar-cooky smell that is very comforting to children who are sad about something. Her clothes are all brown and never lookcrisp and pressed because they are used for dress-up. She wears felt hats which the children poke and twist into witches' and pirates' hats and she does not mind at all. Sunday mornings she takes one of the hats off the closet shelf, gives it a few thumps, pulls it firmly down fore and aft and wears it to church. She wears very high heels all the time and is glad to let the little girls borrow her shoes.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has no family at all. She says that her husband, Mr. Piggle-Wiggle, was a pirate and after he had buried all of his treasure in the back yard, he died. She just has herself and Wag, her dog, and Lightfoot, her cat.
The most remarkable thing about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is her house, which is upside down. It is a little brown house, and sitting there in its tangly garden it looks like a small brown puppy lying on its back with its feet in the air. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle says that when she was a little girl she used to lie in bed and gaze up at the ceiling and wonder and wonder what it would be like if the house were upside down. And so when she grew up and built her own house she had it built upside down, just to see. The bathroom, the kitchen and the staircase are right side up-they are more convenient that way. You can easily see that you could not cook on an upside-down stove or wash dishes in an upsidedown sink or walk up upside-down stairs.
In the living room of her house is a large chandelier and instead of being on the ceiling it is on the floor. Of course it is really on the ceiling, but the ceiling is the floor and so it is on the floor and the children turn on the lights and then squat around it pretending it is a campfire. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle says that her chandelier is the only one in town which is put to any real use. Her bedrooms all have slidy boards in them because if you will look up at your attic ceiling you will see that a slanty ceiling when turned upside down makes a fine slidy board. Also all the wall lights are very close to the floor and handy for the small children. For the first five or ten years after the house was built Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle climbed in and out of her rooms over the high doorways but now she has little steps which are just the thing to practise jumping. She gives the children chalk so they can mark on the rug how far they jump.
Nobody knows how old Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is. She says she doesn't know herself. She says, "What difference does it make how old I am when I shall never grow any bigger."
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's dog, Wag, has puppies every once in a while and so she
keeps a long list of names of children who want them on the blackboard in her kitchen. For Lightfoot-the-cat's kittens she has a long waiting list on the blackboard in the dining room.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's back yard is full of big holes where small boys dig for
Mr. Piggle-Wiggle's buried treasure and her front yard is full of flowers which the little girls pick, jam into vases and place about her living room or carry to their teachers.
Every child in town is a friend of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's but she knows very few of their parents. She says grown-ups make her nervous.
For the first year after she built her house, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle lived there all by herself except for Wag and Lightfoot, and she was very lonely. Then, one dark, rainy afternoon when she was baking sugar cookies and thinking how much fun it would be if she knew someone besides Wag and Lightfoot to invite for tea, she happened to look out of her kitchen window and there coming up the street in the pouring rain, dragging a big suitcase and bawling, was a little girl. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle wiped the flour off her hands and hurried right out into the rain and invited the little girl in for tea.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Copyright © by Betty MacDonald. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
