Rosettes on the Church Steps

The rosettes

If you did not grow up Norwegian in northeast Iowa, I should tell you what a rosette is.

It is a thin, crisp, fried cookie in the shape of a flower or a star, made with an iron.

The iron is a little cast metal shape on a long handle.

You heat it in hot oil, dip it in a thin batter of eggs, milk, flour, a little sugar and a pinch of salt, and put it back in the oil.

If the oil is right, about three hundred seventy-five degrees, the batter puffs and turns gold in half a minute and slides off the iron with a nudge of a fork. If the oil is wrong, nothing works.

The trick is not to dip the iron too deep. The batter has to come up the sides but never over the top, or the rosette will not let go.

My mother can do it without looking. I still have to look.

You drain them upside down on brown paper grocery sacks, and when they are cool, you dust them with powdered sugar through a sieve.

They are so light a dozen weighs almost nothing. They break if you think about them too hard.

Mom learned from her mother, Grandma Thorsrud, who came over as a girl and kept her iron wrapped in a flour sack.

Mom has used that same iron for forty years, along with three more she bought at auctions.

For forty years she had fried rosettes in the first two weeks of October and sold them at the church fall bazaar.

For forty years the money from that table had gone to one thing: her property tax.

Here is how it works in Winneshiek County. Your tax comes in two halves. The first half is due in September.

The second half is not due until March, but you can pay it early, any day you like.

Dad never liked owing the county anything over the winter. When he was alive, they paid the March half every October, the Monday after the bazaar, at the treasurer’s window in the courthouse. After he died, Mom kept doing it.

The second half on her little house on the north side of town was seven hundred twelve dollars that year.

The rosette money covered most of it. She made up the rest from her Social Security check and never said a word about it.

So when Gordy told her six hundred forty dollars was gone, he was not telling her a little money had gone missing.

He was telling her the one thing she had paid for herself, with her own two hands, for forty years, was gone.

The parking lot

I caught up with her in the church parking lot. The maples along the street had turned, and the leaves were coming down in that slow way they do on a still October afternoon.

“Mom,” I said. “We should talk to the pastor. Or Borghild. She chairs the committee. Somebody should go through that hall again before they lock up.”

“Solveig.” She stopped by her car, an old tan sedan she keeps washed every Saturday whether it needs it or not. “Gordon looked. He said he looked. Let’s not make a show of it.”

“It’s six hundred forty dollars.”

“I know what it is.” She found her keys in her purse.

Her hands were shaking a little, not much, but I had never seen my mother’s hands shake when she held her keys. “I’ll manage.”

“Let me drive you.”

“I can drive myself four blocks,” she said. Then she softened, the way she always does after she has been sharp with one of us. “Come by tomorrow after church. I’ll make coffee.”

I watched her back out, slow and careful, with both hands on the wheel.

Then I stood in the parking lot for a long minute and looked at the basement windows of the fellowship hall.

My husband, Arne, came out the side door carrying two folding tables under one arm.

He is a mechanic at the bus garage where I dispatch, a quiet man who has never once raised his voice at me in twenty-six years.

“Your mom go home?” he asked.

“Gordy says her envelope’s gone,” I said. “Somebody took it out of the cash box in the rush, he says.”

Arne set the tables down against the car. He looked at the side door Gordy would come out of. He did not say anything for a while, which is how Arne thinks.

“Huh,” he said finally. That was all. But I have been married to him long enough to know that “huh” from Arne is about four paragraphs from anybody else.