A New Home for Lily Read online

  Not much later, Joseph and Dannie returned home with a note for Mama. As she read it, the corners of her mouth slipped into a smile.

  A good sign. “Are they coming?” Lily asked.

  “Yes, they are,” Mama said. “Which means we still have a lot of work to get done before then.”

  By midday, the house was clean. It was time to start cooking and baking Grandma’s birthday meal. Time for Jell-O making.

  Lily filled the big teakettle with water and set it on the front of the stove so that it would heat faster. “What kind of Jell-O shall I make?”

  “You can choose whatever flavor you like,” Mama said.

  Lily climbed up on the counter and looked through the supply of Jell-O Mama had in the cupboard. Mama bought Jell-O in big bags at the bulk food store. Lily tried to think how much to make so that everyone could have as much as they wanted to. A cup full of Jell-O for everyone would be just about right. She counted up: Mama, Papa, Lily, Joseph, Dannie, Grandma Miller, Grandpa Miller, Aunt Susie. Uncle Jacob and Aunt Lizzie would stay with Great-Grandma, so that made eight people. Lily would need at least eight cups of Jell-O.

  Next: which flavor should she choose? Sometimes Mama mixed a few flavors together. Lily decided she would choose several flavors and mix them together. She chose a bag of orange, blueberry, apricot, and strawberry. She hoped that mixing these flavors together would make the best Jell-O they had ever tasted.

  Lily hopped off the counter. She found a big bowl and carefully measured eight cups of Jell-O powder into it. The teapot was whistling, but Mama was in the basement to select potatoes, onions, and apples. Lily didn’t want to wait to stir the Jell-O until Mama came upstairs. She knew Mama was worried she would burn herself, but she knew she could do it. She would work slowly and carefully, measuring out the teakettle of boiling water.

  She put her hands in big potholders and lifted the handle of the teakettle. Grasping the heavy kettle with both hands, she carried it off the stove, holding it out in front of her. She shuffled her way slowly, cautiously, over to the sink. She was relieved when she safely set it into the sink. She found a measuring cup, set it in the sink, and carefully tipped the teakettle of boiling water into it. Then she poured the cup of hot water into the bowl filled with Jell-O powder. Cup after cup. She had just finished pouring the water over the Jell-O when Mama came back upstairs.

  “Oh, Lily, I wanted you to wait until I came back.” She hurried to the sink. “Let me measure the boiling water for you.” When she reached the bowl, she stopped abruptly. Lily looked up at her. Something wasn’t right. The Jell-O was gray.

  “How much Jell-O did you measure into the bowl?” Mama asked.

  “Eight cups full,” Lily said. “One cup for everyone. I mixed flavors.”

  Mama’s eyes went wide. Then she burst out laughing. “Eight cups full!” She laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. “Well, it looks like we will be eating Jell-O for a long time.”

  Gray Jell-O.

  Lily wished she had waited until Mama had come before she added the water. She had not thought how much Jell-O it would make if she measured eight cups full into her bowl. At least Mama wasn’t upset with her. Lily had never seen Mama giggle so much before. It made Lily giggle too, even though she wasn’t sure what the problem was.

  Mama wiped away her tears and took a deep breath. “Okay. Right now what we need is a bigger bowl. A much, much bigger bowl.” She looked in the sink at the Jell-O again. “I think we’ll have to use a five-gallon pail.” She hurried down to the basement to find one. She brought one upstairs and washed it out with soap and hot water to make sure it was clean. She set the pail on the floor and then dumped the bowl of Jell-O into it. Next she started measuring and pouring in the boiling water. She handed a wooden spoon to Lily and told her to stir it until all the Jell-O had dissolved.

  After Mama was satisfied that the Jell-O was dissolved, she was ready to measure the cold water. After all the water had been measured, Lily discovered that they had at least forty cups of Jell-O. She had never seen that much Jell-O in her life. She had certainly never seen such a gray color of Jell-O before. No wonder Mama had laughed.

  The rest of the day, Lily helped Mama prepare other food. They had to walk around the pail of Jell-O in the middle of the kitchen. It was too heavy for Mama to move by herself, so it would have to wait until Papa came home. He would be able to carry the heavy pail down to the basement where it would stay nice and cold until tomorrow’s dinner.

  When Papa finally came home, his eyebrows shot up when he saw the pail of gray Jell-O sitting in the middle of the kitchen. He looked questioningly at Mama. “Is there a reason you made enough Jell-O to feed the church?”

  “It’s all part of the adventure of having a young cook in the house,” Mama said.

  Lily told him the story of the Jell-O. Papa looked at Mama, and then they both burst out laughing. Why was it so funny?

  Papa patted her head. “It looks like Lily is practicing to cook for lots of people.” He bent down and lifted the pail with an extra grunt. He winked at Lily and she knew he had only pretended that it was very heavy for him as he carried it to the basement.

  The next morning, Mama sent Lily to the basement with a big bowl and a dipper to scoop Jell-O out of the pail. She had some fruit ready to mix into it. Lily hoped it might not have quite such a gray tinge after the fruit was added.

  Lily pushed the dipper into the Jell-O to scoop some out and put into the bowl. It made a funny slurping noise as she pulled the dipper out. Once the bowl was full, Lily looked at the pail. There was still so much Jell-O in it that she couldn’t even see the bottom of the pail through the glassy gelatin. They would have to eat Jell-O for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for weeks and weeks, months and months, if they were ever going to empty that pail.

  When Grandpa and Grandma and Aunt Susie arrived, Lily ran to the door to meet them.

  Aunt Susie had brought her doll along to play with. She and Lily loved to play dolls together. “First,” Lily whispered to her, “I have something to show you in the basement.”

  Grandma went to the kitchen to help Mama finish getting dinner ready while Lily and Aunt Susie slipped quietly down to the basement. Lily walked over to the pail of Jell-O and pointed. “Look how much Jell-O I made yesterday.”

  Aunt Susie peered into the pail. “Gray Jell-O. Is this all we will have to eat today?”

  “No, Mama made a good dinner,” said Lily. “But we do have a lot of Jell-O.” They both peered into the pail again. “Quite a lot.”

  They went back upstairs. Grandma filled the water glasses as Mama dished out bowls of steaming food. Mama saw Lily and Aunt Susie come into the kitchen. “Go tell Papa that dinner is ready.”

  Lily went to the living room to tell Papa and Grandpa that it was time to eat. As everyone sat at the table, Papa bowed his head to ask a silent blessing. When it was over, Papa lifted his head and reached for the platter of fresh homemade bread to pass it around the table. When it came to Aunt Susie, she passed the bread on to Joseph without taking a slice.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any bread today?” Grandpa asked. Everyone knew that Aunt Susie liked bread.

  Aunt Susie shook her head. “Not today,” she said in her slow, thick way. “I’m saving room for Lily’s gray Jell-O. She made a whole pail full and we need to help her eat it.”

  Mama explained about the Jell-O and everyone laughed, especially Joseph, which got Dannie giggling. Lily nudged them under the table with her toe.

  “Send a bowlful home with us,” Grandma said.

  “You mean, a bucketful,” Grandpa murmured.

  Grandma ignored him. She turned to Lily. “It takes a lot of practice to become a good cook. I’m happy to hear that you’re already starting to learn.”

  Grandpa leaned toward Lily and lowered his voice. “Someday, you might want to ask Grandma about your mother’s adventures as a beginner cook.” He winked at Lily. “I seem to remember something about
gravy on the ceiling.”

  “Dad!” Mama said, pretending to be horrified, and everyone laughed.

  While everyone helped themselves to second and third helpings of Jell-O, Lily made a point to remember to ask Grandma about Mama and the ceiling gravy story on her next visit.

  Summer was deepening. It would soon be time for the start of another school year. Mama was working hard to make sure that Lily and Joseph had new clothes to wear. Lily stood at the edge of the sewing table. She liked to watch Mama sew new shirts and dresses.

  Mama pumped the sewing machine’s treadle up and down with her foot as fast as she could. The stack of finished shirts, pants, dresses, and aprons grew bigger and bigger every day. When the last piece of clothing had been sewn, Mama asked Lily to dig through the button box and find enough matching buttons for all the new clothes.

  Lily liked digging through the button box. She carefully counted out little piles of buttons that matched the dresses and shirts. She needed seven buttons for each shirt, five buttons for each dress, and one for the apron. Nine buttons for each pair of pants. Pants didn’t have nice buttons. They all looked the same. Big and black. Lily was glad she was a girl and all her buttons could be pretty.

  After Lily had counted out the buttons into little piles, Mama told her to put them into an empty pill bottle. Mama folded the clothes and put them into two grocery bags. “Take these to Grandma Miller,” she said. “Ask her if she has time to sew the buttons and buttonholes. I’m already way behind in the garden and everything that needs to be done around here.”

  “Can I stay for a while?” Lily asked.

  “You can stay for an hour,” Mama said. “But then I need you to hurry home and help me weed the garden.”

  Lily picked up the bags and hurried down the road to Grandma’s house. She could hear the noisy hum of Grandpa’s sawmill before she reached the driveway.

  When she reached the house, Lily knocked on the door and waited for Grandma to open the door. Lily explained how busy Mama was and asked if Grandma could sew the buttons and buttonholes for their new school clothes.

  “Sure,” Grandma said, “I’ll get started on them right away.”

  “Mama said I can stay for an hour today,” Lily said.

  She followed Grandma into her craft room. Great-Grandma was sleeping in the bed against the wall. She slept most of the day, which was a relief to Lily. Grandma sat on her rocking chair in front of the window and pulled a shirt out of the bag. Lily counted out the matching buttons for her. Grandma carefully cut buttonholes down the front and on the cuffs of the sleeves. She threaded a needle and started to sew the first buttonhole with tiny, even stitches. So tiny! Lily’s stitches were still crooked and clumsy.

  Aunt Susie came into the room to see what they were doing. She pulled chairs in from the kitchen so she and Lily would have a place to sit. The only sound in the room was Great-Grandma’s whiffling little snores. She slept through it all.

  As Lily watched Grandma make the needle fly in and out of the fabric, she waited for the right moment to ask Grandma a question that had been buzzing around her brain. “Can you tell me some stories about teaching Mama to cook?”

  Grandma smiled. “It was an adventure to teach my little Rachel how to cook.” She cut another yard of thread from the spool and threaded the needle for another buttonhole. “Your mama used to think that there was nothing more special than an angel food cake. She would ask me over and over if she could bake one. I thought it was much too hard for a little girl to beat those egg whites. Making an angel food cake is hard work. My own arms always grew very tired.”

  Aunt Susie pulled her chair closer to listen to the story. Rachel, Lily’s mama, was her older sister, and she didn’t remember these stories. “One day,” Grandma said, “when she asked me again, I told her she could make a regular cake and bake it in the angel food cake pan.” Grandma paused and looked at Lily. “You know what an angel food cake pan looks like, don’t you?”

  Lily nodded. Mama still liked angel food cake best of all. Whenever they had too many eggs on hand, she would make the cake. The pan was deep and round, with a long tube up the middle. The whole bottom could be lifted out.

  “Rachel was happy to use that cake pan,” Grandma said. “She started mixing up our favorite chocolate cake. She got everything mixed up nicely and poured it into the cake pan and spread the batter around the tube until it was nice and even. She licked the empty bowl and spoon and put them into the sink to soak until we were ready to do the dishes.

  “She wanted to put the cake into the oven by herself. She carried it over with two hands—one on the bottom, one on the side. Then, all of a sudden, before I realized what was happening, she reached out with one hand to open the oven door. The bottom part of the cake pan dropped out and cake batter ran everywhere. She was covered in chocolate batter! It ran down the front of her dress, her shoes, and the floor.” Grandma chuckled. “We didn’t get any cake that day, but your mama learned the proper way to carry a tube cake pan.”

  Lily tried to imagine Mama as a little girl. She couldn’t believe Mama could make such a big mess. Nowadays, she was so tidy.

  Aunt Susie giggled and giggled, so much that Great-Grandma stirred. “Tell another story about Rachel, Mom.”

  “Maybe . . . the gravy story,” Lily reminded.

  Grandma finished one shirt and picked up a dress. She took her time finding just the right thread color. When she was ready, she leaned back in her chair and started to sew another buttonhole. “We often had biscuits and chicken gravy for supper. Your Mama wanted to make the biscuits by herself. I thought she had helped me often enough that there shouldn’t be a problem. If she needed help, I would be right there to help her. But she was feeling particularly grown-up that evening and said she wanted to make supper all by herself.

  “I told her if she needed me, she could call for help. I went into the living room to do some sewing. After a while I could smell the biscuits baking. I thought they smelled a little different than usual, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Finally, she announced that supper was ready. I went to the kitchen to help her put everything on the table.” Grandma started laughing now, so hard that tears rolled down her cheeks. “Those biscuits were the sorriest looking things I had ever seen. Instead of nice fluffy biscuits, they had run together into a flat mess. They even dripped right off the edge of the cookie sheet. I tasted a corner, and it was so sweet, I had to go get a drink of water right away. I asked her how much sugar she had added, and she said, ‘Just what the recipe called for.’ Turns out she had used one and one-half cups of sugar instead of one and one-half teaspoons. We ate those biscuits with fruit for dessert that night and spooned the gravy on bread instead.” She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath.

  Lily felt sorry for Mama! She was trying so hard to be grown-up. “Was that the ceiling gravy that Grandpa talked about?”

  Grandma looked confused. Then a laugh burst out of her. “Oh, I’d forgotten about that cooking lesson. Another time, Rachel wanted to make flour paste to thicken the gravy, and things didn’t work quite so well. We used to have a plastic can with a snap-on lid to shake the paste until it was nice and smooth. Rachel thought it would be better to use hot water instead of cold to make the paste. The only trouble was when she tried to shake the can, the hot water created pressure and made the lid pop off. The entire kitchen was splattered with flour paste. There was paste on the ceiling, the walls, and the cupboards. It was an awful mess to try to clean up. It dries fast like glue.”

  “Did Rachel do other funny things?” Aunt Susie asked.

  “Yes, she sure did,” said Grandma. “But I think those stories will have to wait until some other day. Lily’s hour is up and I’m sure her mama needs her little helper at home.”

  Lily said goodbye and started for home. It had been fun to hear that Mama had made funny mistakes when she had been learning how to cook. It made Lily’s gray Jell-O not seem so bad. Not so bad at all.


  But the thought of eating one more bite of Jell-O made her want to gag.

  20

  Summer’s End

  It was a nice summer day in mid-August. The kitchen windows were steamed up from the boiling pot of water on the stove. Lily felt hot and sweaty as she sat at the kitchen table with Joseph and Dannie. In the middle of the table was a mountain of green beans, freshly picked from the garden. Each bean needed its ends pinched off and to be broken into pieces. Mama wanted to spend the day canning beans.

  Lily pinched off the ends while Joseph and Dannie snapped the beans into little pieces and tossed them into a big stainless steel bowl. Plink, plink, plink. The boys thought it was fun, like playing ball, but Lily had grown tired of this tedious work. Beans, beans, beans. That’s all she had been doing lately: picking them, snapping them, breaking them into pieces. Before beans, it was peas. Soon, it would be tomatoes and squash. She was as busy as a bird dog.

  Taking care of a big garden was so much work. Canning food for the winter was even more work. If they weren’t canning, they were weeding and watering the garden so that the vegetables would grow and produce more . . . which meant more canning. Over and over and over, all summer long. Something had to be done every single day.

  She looked out the window and saw Jim and Pansy grazing in the pasture. The sun shone brightly and a nice breeze made the tall pasture grass look like rippling waves. Sometimes, Lily wished she could be a horse or a cow. They could do whatever they wanted to all day long and never had to worry about canning food.

  Mama noticed. “Is something bothering you, Lily?”

  Lily sighed. “I’m tired of canning.”

  Mama nodded her head. “It’s a lot of hard work. I will be very glad once all the shelves in the basement are full again and the garden is done for another year.”

  Lily was surprised to hear Mama admit that. She had no idea that Mama ever grew tired of this kind of work. Mama never complained.