Combine potatoes, sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla, and milk. Mix well. Spoon mixture into a 2-quart casserole dish. Bake at 350Â°F for 20 to 25 minutes or until bubbles come through center.

Combine topping ingredients, mixing them well, and sprinkle on top of potatoes. Bake 5 minutes more.

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MARGARET PEELE

The Cookbook Committee of the Hope Springs Community Church is currently receiving recipes for their upcoming Women's Guild Cookbook. Anyone with recipes please contact one of the following women: Margaret Peele, Louise Fisher, Beatrice Newgarden, or Jessie Jenkins.

T
here. That was short, to the point, and easy to type. Surely, Rev. Stewart wouldn't have a problem printing that in the bulletin. One could never be sure. She likes her announcements worded a certain way. At least four people I know of, personally, have seen their flower memorials and their thank-you notes shortened or added to by this woman pastor who thinks she has a flair for words.

Truth be told, no one really complains about what she does with the announcements, it just seems like a lot of work for a girl who appears not to have any extra time. After all, no one really cares if the flowers are “lovingly placed in memory” or simply “put at the altar.” They just want to make sure their mama's name is spelled right and that each of the seven children is listed in correct birth order. Names and dates. That's what matters.

Sometimes I'm not sure the young pastor has a good hold on what really matters; but she tries hard and most of the people are warm to her, so I don't plan to rock her boat by saying such a thing to her. Besides, she's young, she'll learn. We all do.

This cookbook was not my idea. Since the Women's Guild
is dying out, we're running out of money. It was Peggy DuVaughn's notion that we needed to raise some money. And then I think it was Beatrice Newgarden, who has nothing better to do than volunteer at the funeral parlor, who agreed we should have a project. Great, I think, a project. Another project. And before I have a chance to write it down in my secretary's notes, it's a cookbook, and I'm in charge.

As far as cooking goes, I'm considered only fair by the women in this community. Out here, everybody grows their own vegetables, has their own livestock, kills, milks, and cans. So every recipe begins with something like “Strip all the feathers from the bird” or “Make sure the roots and stems are cut.” The standards are a little higher than say, Greensboro, where I took my sweet potato casserole to a women's meeting; and having set it down next to all the KFC boxes and the Winn-Dixie potato salad, was treated like I was Cordelia Kelly from Channel 2's cooking show.

Here, in the county, women grew up learning to cook before they were tall enough to reach the stove. It was the mother's and the grandmother's responsibility to make sure all the girls in the family could make a meal out of one strip of meat and a cup of beans. So we learned to cook. And we learned to be creative. We learned how to stretch dough across two weeks at three squares a day. We learned how to make soup from bones and old potatoes. And we learned to knead our sorrows and our dreams into loaves of bread and our worthiness into cherry pies and fatty pork chops.

When my mama died and I was ten, I lost interest in what the female gender does in the kitchen. My older sisters cooked
and cleaned while I worked in the fields, on the tractor, and behind the woodshed. I did anything that kept me from standing in my mama's prints that were worn into the boards in front of the sink or cast in iron in the handles of skillets. Those days folks didn't know what to do with a grieving child, so they just let me do the work of men and left me to myself.

My daddy was solemn, not much with words or girl children. But because I looked the most like my mother and because I stayed as close to him as the film of dirt that crept from the fields into wrinkles and under nails, he paid me the most attention. I pretended for a very long time that my sisters and brothers didn't notice, but after he died I sensed the resentment and the stones of sibling rivalry as they pelted me with their grief-stricken stares.

I was, after all, the only one he would let shave him or feed him teaspoonsful of honey. His last five years he lived with each daughter and son, but everyone knew that he was saving my house for last. Like getting ready for retirement, Daddy mapped out his final six months with great care. When he left Woodrow's to enter the hospital for the eighth time, he sent his belongings to me, and, leaving the cancer unit, Daddy came home to 516 Hawthorne Lane to die.

Surely he knew that I was the only one who would pick him up and set him behind the wheel of the tractor, wait until the vomiting stopped, and then steer him across the pasture while he worked the pedals. I was the only one who would pad down the dirt and make a hard path so that I could push his wheelchair through the soybean field. I was the only child of his who would not mind hearing his stories over and over, help him reorder his memories, or who would sit with him through thunderstorms
while he called me “Mama.” So if Beulah and Bessie, Thomas Jack and Woodrow are still mad at me for picking out the casket and telling the funeral director how to dress Daddy, then they are the ones who have to live with anger. All I got is sadness. And a heart can hold sadness a lot longer than it can anger.

I know because I've held both, and the sadness always outlasts the anger. You have to make an intentional decision either to give the anger up or to let it eat out the center of your spirit. Sadness can stay with a body for a lifetime. But with anger, you've got to choose. That's what killed Luther, and that's how I learned such a lesson.

He stayed angry as long as he could. And finally his head exploded because of the clogged pathways from his heart. It had nothing to do with cigarettes or cholesterol like the doctors said and everything to do with anger. I am not sure how it all began. Whether he had the seed of madness in his soul from when he was a boy or whether it was planted when he saw the first construction sign about the hatchery in Eleanor Littleton's hayfield. However it got there, bit by bit, the seed grew inside him so that each time the hatchery sold chickens at a better price or every winter when a storm blew off siding or froze our birds, his face got redder and redder, and the anger welled up in his veins.

I begged him, I pleaded with him, “Give up the chicken farm!” I knew that we both could find public work, but it became an obsession, a war in his mind, and he would not let it go. He died at the age of forty-seven, burying what was left of the carcasses of twenty-five chickens, killed by a pack of wild dogs. The hatchery gave me a fair price for his last shipment of chicks. And even though his brothers and sisters couldn't believe that I'd sell
them, and especially to the place that everyone said brought my husband down, I took the money and two years later went on a cruise. Now all that stands as a memorial to that which he would not let go is a fallen down barn surrounded by a steel fence, the pungent odor of old chicken shit, and a few feathers that float just inside the windows.

I live alone. We had no children. I feed five cats and take care of two old dogs. I expect little out of life and am rarely disappointed. I rent out most of the land to Jessie Jenkins's oldest son, who tries to make a go of it every year raising tobacco and corn.

Active in church, I'm chosen to serve on lots of committees. This is partly because folks think I have more time than money and because there is a certain amount of respect granted to women who make it on their own. Unlike Louise Fisher's situation, most people are comfortable with the notion that I'm just a lonely widow and not a homosexual. So that even though we are the same age and in the same economic class, and even though it is common knowledge that Louise knows the Bible better than anyone, I am usually the one asked to chair boards and work on programs.

Nobody knows for sure about Louise. But there are speculations and bits of trashy stories about her car having been discovered at the Trucker's Lodge Motel and two women's voices coming from room seven; and there is the report on a number of books she receives in the mail from San Francisco.

Frankly, I'm not interested in trashy stories or in the sexual orientation of my friends. And if the truth be told, I am probably a more likely candidate to love a woman than Louise, since I
could use a wife to manage the household responsibilities that women are supposedly more inclined to handle. And, at this point in my life, I value more deeply the company of women than men. I think this has to do with the holding of sadness. If forced to choose, women will give up everything else but hold on to that.

I have little energy for anxiety about money or the state of the union. I do love sports but not enough to talk about them, and every evening, just as dusk has passed, I find that I desire the softness of a woman's voice. Though it is my father's voice that rings in my head and all along the edges of my heart, it is the faint and melodic voice of a woman that rocks my soul to sleep.

Most of the women at Hope Springs have never even entertained such a notion. They busy up their lives with the comings and goings of their children and trying to second-guess the needs of their husbands. Their days are filled with talk shows and coupon clipping, malicious gossip about the same women they claim to have as friends, and long gazes into the mirror while they touch the fallen skin along their necks and worry that age will steal it all away.

They are cautious with me because I have little patience for their pettiness. They are civil towards me, however, because they know their husbands admire my fortitude and the way I loved my father. I wouldn't say that they respect me, but they are almost certain to know of my opinion and are guaranteed that I will not bow and curtsy in the way so many of them have been taught.

This unwillingness to cower has occasionally permitted me the surprising opportunity to have long and interesting conver
sations with daughters and granddaughters who bear great secrets. I would say I am in a most enviable and sacred position. Most of the women in the community know this but would never call attention to it.

For instance, I was the first one to know that Katie Askew was not going to take chemotherapy. A pretty little thing of fifteen and she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I noticed the shifting of her eyes when she realized that she would lose her long blond curls. Nancy, her mother, was so distraught about the diagnosis and so determined about the treatments that she hadn't even considered that the loss of hair to a fifteen-year-old girl was a fate worse than death. After her first hospitalization, a week before she was to go down to Duke for chemo, Katie had her mother bring her to my house. After her mother left to get her medicines, Katie looked out the window and said, “I want you to talk to my mother.”

“About what, Katie?” I asked.

“About the fact that I'm not going to go to Duke for those treatments.”

Part of her head was already shaven, but a bandage covered the place behind her left ear. The blonde curls fell over it.

“Katie, what makes you think I'd tell your mother such a thing? And, besides, you know that will kill her.”

“I remember what you told us in Sunday School four years ago. You said the most important thing is to be honest with the people you love, and if you can't be honest then you should get somebody else to speak your truth. So I'm asking you, will you tell her I'm not going to go?”

The big brown eyes would not let me loose. I tried to find
another way. I told her to talk to the preacher or to her father, but little Katie Askew was convinced that I was the messenger of her truth. Finally I told her I would. And true to my word, when Nancy came back and Katie was sleeping in my bed upstairs, I convinced the teenage girl's mother to postpone the treatments until Katie could ease into the idea of queens who wrapped their heads in long, flowing scarves and the open-ended fashion of wearing outrageous straw hats.

Since then I've dealt with everything from failing grades to Penny Throckmorton's plan to elope with a sailor from Norfolk. I'm not altogether comfortable with the role of teenage advocate in the Hope Springs community, but for whatever reason it seems to fit. Besides, all the storms that blow into the lives of families around us funnel the clouds that spin around our own hearts as well.

Like in every community, that's how it goes here in Hope Springs. Trouble passes from one door to another. Tragedy and adventure not quite as regular, but, still, they come too. And while one mother thanks God for not having sent a particular sorrow her way, she prepares herself for what might be coming next. Because surely every mother knows that when a woman grants life to a new person, a child, sorrow is the only guarantee she will ever have.

Yet even that sometimes sounds better than having to chair every committee or head up every project because all the other women think you're lonely for something to do. Of course, I know I could say no. But I guess I figure I'm luckier than most; I've carried all of the sorrow I'm ever going to have. There isn't much that can break my heart anymore, so I consider it a privi
lege not to have to worry about the future. And if calling for recipes permits the mothers in this community to spend more energy preparing the soft places in their hearts for hard news, then I'll oblige. Besides, there are worse things to ask for than recipes.

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