“Jason Squiff was a cistern cleaner. He had greenish yellowish hair. If you looked down into a cistern when he was lifting buckets of slush and mud you could tell where he was you could pick him out down in the dark cistern, by the lights of his greenish yellowish hair.”

—Carl Sandberg, from “The Story of Jason Squiff and Why He Had a Popcorn Hat, Popcorn Mittens and Popcorn Shoes,” one of his Stories from the Rootabaga Country, from a collected edition of 1973.