The Recipe Card at the Bake Sale

Teaching Janet

We scalded the milk. I showed her how to wait for the skin. I showed her how to test it on the inside of her wrist, and she did, and she laughed and said her mother used to do that for bottles.

I showed her how to crush the cardamom with the bottom of a jelly glass.

“Nobody uses cardamom,” Janet said.

“Grandma’s mother was Swedish,” I said. “From up by Lindsborg. That’s the secret. That’s what everybody tastes and can’t name.”

Janet stopped crushing. “I’ve been eating that for forty years and I never knew what it was.”

“Now you know.”

When it came time to knead, she started punching the dough, the way people do. I put my hands over hers, the way Grandma put her hands over mine when I was eleven years old on a kitchen chair.

“You don’t punch it,” I said. “You push it away and fold it back. Like you are tucking in a child.”

Janet did not say anything. She just did it. Push it away and fold it back. I took my hands off hers and let her.

After a while I noticed she was crying again, quietly, the tears running down and dropping right onto the counter next to the bowl. She did not stop kneading.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” I said. I handed her a dish towel. “That’s just what this dough does. It did it to me too.”

The Wait

The first rise takes an hour and a half. We sat at my kitchen table and drank coffee and waited.

Janet set her coffee cup down on the table.

I looked at it. Then I looked at the card in its sleeve, with the coffee ring in the corner from 1961. And I looked at the ring Janet’s cup had left on my table.

I did not say anything about it. But Janet saw me looking, and she looked too, and she understood. She put her hand flat on the table next to the ring and left it there a minute.

When the dough was ready, she tapped the bowl with one finger, the way I had shown her. “Is it ready?” she asked, and then she caught herself, and laughed.

“Don’t rush good things,” we said at the same time.

Paul came in for more coffee right then and found the two of us laughing at my kitchen table with flour on our sleeves. Later he told me it was the best thing he had seen all year.

We made three dozen. Janet rolled every one of them. Her rectangles were better than Paul’s.

The Anniversary Dinner

On Sunday, after the anniversary service, the whole church came down the stairs into the fellowship hall for the dinner. There were close to two hundred people. They had to set up the extra tables in the hallway by the nursery.

On the wall by the pass-through window, somebody had hung an easel with a poster board. The second printing had come in that week, and the new cover was blown up big on the board.

The second printing had our steeple on the cover, against a plain Kansas sky. And under it, in gold letters: 125 Years of Grace. Featuring Hazel Lindquist’s Cinnamon Rolls, October 1961.

And there in the corner was the photograph, Grandma at her farmhouse stove in a flowered apron, turning to look at whoever was holding the camera, about to say something. I had always loved that picture because she looks like she is about to laugh.

After the meal, Pastor Dan stood up and thanked everybody, and introduced the district superintendent, who said a few kind words about faithfulness. And then Janet stood up, and said, “Missy Kurtz has a story to tell you about a recipe card.”