Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: JAM (02/09/17)
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TITLE: Secret Ingredient | Previous Challenge Entry
By Ann Stocking
02/15/17 -
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ADD TO MY FAVORITES
For twenty years straight, my strawberry jam won the Cloverton Fall Fair Preserves Grand Champion Award. And then Mabel Harrison moved to town and stole the title from me with her sticky fingers. She won the big rosette and the $15.00 grand prize.
The Fall Fair is just around the corner again, and whatever it takes, I’m going to get my title back. I don a straw hat, the one with gardenias, and my best summer dress, and head out to visit Mabel.
Mabel welcomes me as if I am her favourite bosom friend returned from a prolonged journey. She invites me in to tea, and I accept. Her house is spotless, but they say an immaculate house is a sign of an unbalanced psyche, don’t they? My own home exhibits a wholesome symmetry between neatness and nonchalance.
“Milk or cream?” she asks.
“Milk, please. You’re looking extremely well, Mabel,” I simper magnanimously. Two can play at this game.
“Thank you.” She sets out thumbprint cookies -- her prize jam, perhaps? -- and pours the tea. We sip in what could be taken for companionable silence. My demeanour is calm, but my mind is busy, calculating the best way to approach her. Then I see it, right outside the dining room window. Her garden is a brilliant abundance of roses, cosmos, columbine, and daisies.
“Oh, my, your garden! It’s beautiful!” I exclaim. In truth, it was.
“Would you like a bouquet?”
“You wouldn’t mind?
“Oh, no, you’d be doing me a favour. Cutting the blooms encourage profuse growth. I’ll get my shears.” She pulls on gardening gloves and tucks shears into her apron pocket. “Would you join me?”
“Yes, I mean, no. I need to use the little girls’ room, if I may?”
“Down the hall and to the right. Then come out and choose the flowers you’d like.”
“I will, yes.” Or perhaps not.
I make sure she’s gone and the kitchen door closed before I fly to the cupboards, swiftly opening and closing the cabinet doors, looking for cookbooks. I finally find them, or rather find one, for there is only one cookbook on the shelf. One lonely cookbook. Its cover is tattered and torn, the pages smeared. I riffle through it quickly.
I find what I am looking for. Grandma’s Prairie Berry Jam, written out on a purple-stained piece of paper. Nothing really special about the recipe. However ...
I don’t trust my memory. I spin about looking for a pencil, then glance outside quickly. Mabel has her face turned to the sun, eyes closed. Her basket is already overflowing with flowers. There’s not time.
I am borrowing, I tell myself. I’ll bring the recipe back when I come for more flowers. I slide the brittle slip of paper into my pocket and dart down the hall, calm myself, and turn around. We both step into the kitchen at the same time.
I gush over the flowers, for I’m not above giving out praise when something is praiseworthy.
It’s then I notice Mabel looks a little peaked.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, quite fine.”
But she is not. I fetch her a glass of water, and pink tints her cheeks again, but she still looks weary.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “My husband died before I moved here last year, and the flowers, well, you know how the fragrance of flowers ... ” She pulls a tissue from her sleeve. “I keep busy. The garden. Church. Sewing. But nothing fills the spot my Clarence left. I’m sorry.”
No, I’m sorry. So sorry.
“Do you know you’re the only person who’s come to visit me? Yet, you’re the last person I’d ever expect, after everyone told me I took your Grand Champion crown at the fair.”
Shame sears me.
She continues. “The jam that won last year was made with berries Clarence and I picked together. I don’t have the heart to go berry picking now. Not alone.”
Compassion rises up, sweet and warm, bubbling from a place I didn’t know existed.
“Mabel, I know I’m not Clarence, but would you like to pick berries with me? Make jam together?”
Mabel smiles.
Mortified, I pull the recipe out of my pocket and she forgives me; I don’t deserve her graciousness. I didn’t enter any jam in the fall fair that year, but I am a winner of a better prize. Far better, indeed.
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Blessings~
A sweet, sweet story of redemption and friendship.