A New Home for Lily (12 page)

“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.

I
t 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.

Mama smiled at her. “As soon as we are done getting these beans ready to put in jars, you can have the rest of the day off to do whatever you want to do.”

Instantly, Lily cheered up. She knew exactly what she wanted to do with the rest of the afternoon. A big patch of burdocks grew in the pasture behind the barn. She had wanted to gather the pretty pink and purple burrs and make little baskets with them.

Finally, the last of the green beans had been snapped and were ready for Mama to put into jars. Lily ran to find several little pails. She handed one to Joseph and one to Dannie and they raced each other to the pasture to gather burrs.

The patch of burdocks behind the barn looked even prettier
than it had when Lily had last noticed them. There weren't very many green burrs any longer. Most of them had turned pretty shades of pink and purple.

Lily started to pick the burrs and drop them in her little pail. Joseph and Dannie filled their pails too. When a pail was full, Lily found a place in the cool, shady barn to dump them. After picking several more pails, Lily thought they had enough to start making the baskets.

Inside the cool of the barn, Lily sat on the floor and showed Joseph and Dannie how to stick the burrs together. She tried to help Dannie make a basket, but he didn't seem to care what he was making. He ended up sticking one burr to the next and made a big ball. Then Joseph added his burrs to Dannie's to make an even bigger ball.

Lily finally gave up trying to show those boys how to make a pretty basket. The boys started to kick the big burr ball around the barn. That was the problem with boys. They didn't know how to play quiet games.

Lily started to make a basket for herself. She made a little one just big enough to hold an egg. It was beautiful, so she decided to make a big basket. She started by making the sides. She sorted through the pile of burrs to choose only the prettiest purple burrs. Purple was her favorite color. She wanted this basket to be the prettiest one she had ever made. Once the sides were completed, she was ready to start making the bottom, but first she had to lift it and admire it a little more.

As she looked at it more closely, it looked like a crown. Dannie came over to see what she had made. “Would you like to wear a crown, Dannie? You can pretend you are a king.”

Dannie liked that idea. He bowed his head while Lily placed the burdock crown carefully on the top of his head. Dannie stood up straight and pretended he was a very important king.
Now Joseph was interested. Dannie pretended he was even more important. The two boys started to get silly again, so Lily decided it would be best to get the crown off Dannie's head and finish making her basket.

Uh oh.

The burrs were stuck to Dannie's hair. Stuck like glue. Lily pulled harder. Dannie started to yelp. The crown wouldn't come off.

Lily forgot about trying to make a pretty basket as she painstakingly started trying to pick one burr at a time from Dannie's hair.

Dannie was crying now. Howling. This was a big mess and Lily was only making it worse. She had no idea what to do next. She would have to take Dannie back to the house and see if Mama could help him.

Dannie wailed like a siren all the way to the house. Mama must have heard him because she met them at the door to see what was wrong. Her eyes went wide when she saw the tangled mess of Dannie's hair. But Mama was a quick thinker. She led Dannie into the kitchen and told him to climb on the stool. She started to try to comb the burrs out.

Even Mama had trouble. The burrs wouldn't let go of Dannie's hair. Mama worked and worked while Dannie pitched a fit the whole time. Finally, Mama had enough. She decided there was nothing else that could be done but to cut the burrs out.

Lily watched as Mama snipped the burrs out of Dannie's hair. By the time Mama was finished, Dannie didn't look like a little Amish boy. He looked like a plucked chicken.

Mama stood back and squinted her eyes. It didn't look as if she liked what she was seeing. “Well, thankfully, hair grows back.”

Lily had been lingering at the door and started to slip outside. But Mama saw her with the eyes in the back of her head. “And now, little lady. Maybe you can explain to me what happened.”

“I was trying to make a pretty basket,” Lily said. “I thought the sides looked like a crown and I set it on top of Dannie's head. I didn't think it would get stuck like that. I'm sorry.”

“Lily, I know you're sorry when things go wrong,” Mama said. “But it would be a good idea to think about what could happen before you do things instead of waiting to think until after something goes wrong.”

The thing was, Mama made thinking sound so easy. She thought Lily just had to think
more
. But Lily knew thinking was so much harder than it sounded.

One good thing about having a hallway bedroom was that Lily could hear everything going on downstairs. On this warm morning in late August, Lily heard Mama in the kitchen. Usually, Lily would wait until Mama called for her, but today, she jumped out of bed. She wanted to help Mama get breakfast ready.

It was the first day of school and Lily could hardly wait. Her new lunch pail hung on the wall peg by the kitchen door. It had been there for weeks, waiting and waiting for this day to arrive. Her newly made school clothes hung on several hooks on her hallway bedroom wall. A little paper bag had been filled with crayons, glue, scissors, and a pencil. Best of all, she had a brand new ink pen! She was in third grade now. Old enough to have a pen in school. She took it out every day to show to Joseph. He would need to wait a year for a pen. She liked to point that out to him. Finally, finally,
the day had come when she could use all of these wonderful new school supplies.

Lily skipped down the stairs, happy and lighthearted. She said good morning to Mama and asked if she could pack the lunches.

Mama smiled. “Yes, you can. Let me slice the bread for you and you can start making the sandwiches.”

Lily spread butter and salad dressing on the bread while Mama sliced a nice big garden tomato. Today, Joseph and Lily would have a delicious tomato sandwich.

Lily tucked a homemade cookie into each lunch box and closed the lids. She took a moment to admire her new lunch box. It was sunny yellow and the lid had a border of pink and purple flowers. In the center of the lid, a little girl sat on a grassy hill with purple flowers around her feet. Beside the girl were printed these words: “Herself the elf. Elf fun is for everyone.”

Joseph trudged into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He wasn't nearly as excited about going back to school as Lily was. He hadn't climbed as many trees as he had wanted to and had gone fishing only once. He was sorry that summer was over. Slowly, much too slowly, he worked on his breakfast. His slow eating drove Lily crazy.

Lily couldn't wait until it was time to leave for school. As soon as the breakfast dishes were washed and dried, she hurried upstairs to change into her new blue dress. A few minutes later, she stood by the downstairs clock, waiting until it was time to start for school.

The clock didn't move. Maybe it was broken? Lily couldn't hold still any longer. “Mama, can we go now?”

Joseph groaned.

Mama looked at the clock and smiled. “I guess it doesn't hurt to get to school a little early on the first day.”

Lily bolted to the door. “Come on, Joseph!” She paused at the door just long enough to toss a goodbye over her shoulder to Mama and Dannie.

It was a beautiful morning. Fall would be coming, but for now, it was warm enough to stay barefooted. Small finches sang and twittered as they gathered seeds from big thistles along the road. Lily liked to watch them flit from plant to plant. She wanted to hold one in her hands. She wished they would know that she would never hurt them. It would be fun to hold a bird.

Lily noticed a cluster of black-eyed Susans along the road. She handed her little brown paper bag filled with new school supplies to Joseph. “Hold this for me while I pick flowers for Teacher Rhoda.”

Joseph patiently held Lily's bag while she waded through the tall grass. She gathered as many black-eyed Susans as she could carry. She knew Teacher Rhoda would be pleased.

“You'll have to carry my bag the rest of the way to school,” Lily said.

Joseph wasn't very pleased that he had to carry two bags plus his lunch box. So Lily told him she would carry the bags if he carried the flowers and then he didn't seem to mind the bags.

At the schoolhouse, Teacher Rhoda filled a quart jar with water and Lily's black-eyed Susans, then she put it on her desk in the front of the room. She told Lily that her favorite flower was black-eyed Susan, and Lily couldn't stop grinning.

Little name tags sat on each desk. Lily walked up and down the rows until she found the desk with her name on it. She carefully unpacked her little bag of supplies. She wondered who might be sitting across the aisle from her this year. Beth, she hoped. She peeped at the name on the desk.

No.
Oh no.
Lily's heart sank. The name tag said “Aaron Yoder.” Two years in a row! It was too much to bear. She wondered why Aaron had to sit there, of all places. If Lily were the teacher, she would have Aaron sit in the very front of the row where she could keep an eye on him.

If Lily had to sit next to him, she would not look at him. Not for the entire year. He would be invisible to her.

The Invisible Plan worked all morning long. She completely ignored Aaron. She didn't glance at him, not once. When it was lunchtime, Lily went to wash her hands and get her new lunch box. She sat at her desk and looked at the beautiful little girl elf on the lid.

Suddenly, a loud guffaw came across the aisle—from the invisible part. “Hey, Sam!” Aaron called to his friend. “Lily's lunch box says ‘herself the elf.'” Aaron let out a few more guffaws. “She must be an elf! That's why she's so skinny.”

Lily quickly opened her lunch box so the picture would be hidden.

“Elf, elf, elf,” Aaron chanted.

Sam and a few more of his friends joined him with the elf chant until Teacher Rhoda stopped them with a stern look. “That's enough, boys.”

The lunch box didn't seem quite so pretty to Lily since Aaron had made fun of it. It was spoiled for her.

When the children finished lunch and went outside to play, Aaron ran up to Lily and started to chant, “Elf, elf, elf. Lily is an elf.” More of Aaron's friends gathered around Lily and chanted “elf.” She felt surrounded by a pack of wild hyenas. She darted away and ran off to join the girls.

She thought she might hate Aaron Yoder. She had never hated anyone before, not even Mandy Mast in New York, and it wasn't a good feeling. She knew Mama and Papa would
be sad to think she hated anyone. But still, she couldn't deny how she felt about him.

That evening, Lily stood in front of her mirror. Maybe Aaron Yoder was right. Maybe she was too skinny. Maybe that was why her eyes looked too big and she didn't have dimples in her cheeks like Beth did. She made up her mind to eat more. Then, Aaron Yoder would stop teasing her.