Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: GREED (avarice, particularly for wealth and things) (01/22/15)
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TITLE: Mince-nut Pie | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marlene Bonney
01/25/15 -
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As the youngest, I could accomplish the most, my limber muscles and joints not yet old and arthritic. Aunt Maisy wasn’t putting up near the quantities she used to and Ma, as her oldest sister, wasn’t faring much better. Even though the harvest had been plentiful, the able workers were few. We lost Uncle Albert and cousin Lucy just a month before due to a runaway carriage. And my sister, Auburn, silly child, was laid up with a broken leg after falling out of our apple tree.
“Rusty, honey, go gather up the berries under the south corner tree, will you please?” Aunt Laura pleaded, "My legs are stiff today."
I jumped at the chance to run and play hide-and-seek with my cousins on the way. It would take several trips, too, but it always felt good to stretch my limbs and fill my lungs with the frigid air. Billy and Walter raced past me in a flurry, their brown and gray coats ruffling like air-filled windsocks.
“They must be on the same mission,” chasing after them and flying through the field’s wind pockets while my brownish hair brushed across my eyes.
The other boys had already picked out the choicest yields, but there was plenty to go around. After they left, I scrounged around the surrounding area and piled up a hoard of acorns from under a neighboring oak tree. Afraid the other boys would return for more berries and see my most recent find, I found an old hollow log partly buried under some brush to hide them in. Aunt Lucy’s mince-nut pies were the pride of the neighborhood, so I wasn’t in the mood for sharing. Just in the nick of time, I finished the back and forth trips to fill in the log’s knotty hole. Even as Billy and Walter returned, I gathered up more berries at the south corner, stuffing my bulging pockets, pursing my lips together like a drawstring money bag.
“Sure hope we find enough before it gets dark—Uncle Stu says we’re going to have a strong freeze tonight because his gouty toe is throbbing to beat the band,” Walter announced, “Hey, Rusty, have you seen any acorns laying around?”
Shaking my head “no,” my conscience nudged me like an aching tooth.
“Shucks! Berry treats are good, but nutty-crunch is my favorite!”
After our berry deliveries, a group of us youngsters had a jumping contest, balancing on fence posts and flying through the air to land in leaf piles. I won, my leap gauged at fifteen feet.
Later, the neighborhood bedded down for the night, even as Ol’ Man Winter huffed and puffed out his white magic. Hurling sleet and a bumpy, slippery snow quilt covered the region by dawn, heralding the hardest winter of the decade. Families struggled to ration their root cellar stores of foodstuff while I still kept my secret.
Finally, Ma said our own pantry was dangerously low, so I offered to go farther afield to search for food—although my true goal was the nut cache. My nose almost froze off on the way to the south corner and I prayed I wouldn’t get caught in a blizzard. The pristine, untrammeled powdery snow stretched in all directions as far as I could see . . . the berry tree was barely visible, it’s topmost branches popping out of a snow mountain and bowed over almost in half with a dried-up red berry in the middle, resembling a black widow spider frozen in place.
Even though I had marked my hoard of nuts with my scent, I would never be able to find the buried log to smell them. I had gone on a fool’s errand.
I trudged back home, empty-mouthed, dragging my—once, bushy—raggedy tail behind me. We would not starve, Pa assured us, because our berry stashes had been replenished by Billy and Walter sharing their own limited supply.
There were no mince-nut pies that season, often reminding me—ashamed Rusty Squirrel--that greed doesn’t pay off in the long run.
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