Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: COLOR (07/30/20)
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TITLE: How Fern and I Captured Summer | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marilyn Borga
08/06/20 -
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What was I going to do on a farm for a whole month? Slave labor, no doubt. No friends, no stores, no movie theatre.
I was still fuming the night they dropped me off and went their merry way. Her name was Fern and she looked every bit as old-fashioned as her name. She wore a pink-checkered house dress and her toothy smile dominated her plain round face. After I gave short, snippy replies to her attempts at friendly conversation, she quietly led me to my room and left me to enjoy my own surly company. I cried myself to sleep.
The next morning delicious aromas wafted up the stairway. My stomach growled as I rolled out of bed and tip-toed downstairs. The yellow kitchen was awash with sunshine. On the red and white checkered tablecloth, a blue platter was piled high with golden-brown pancakes. A black iron skillet sizzled with three sunny-side-up eggs and thick slices of pink ham.
Fern eyed me from her place by the stove.
“LeAnn,” she said. “I know you didn’t have a say in coming here. But the truth is, we’re both stuck here for the duration. So how ‘bout we call a truce? If you’ll give it a try, we might both enjoy your time here.”
When she put it that way, it made me feel ashamed. I hadn’t given one thought to how she might feel being stuck with me. I mumbled an apology and she accepted it with a nod.
“Now, once you've had your fill of breakfast, we’ll get going. We have a summer day to capture!”
The first thing we did was to collect a peck basket of green cucumbers from the garden. We scrubbed the dirt off and packed them into a big brown crock with sprigs of yellow dill. Then we poured a concoction of salt and vinegar over top and weighed it down with a white plate and a brick on top.
The next day, the hired man, who did what Fern called the “heavy work” on the farm, brought us a half bushel of peaches from a local orchard. We spent the morning scalding the fuzzy red skins off and packing the slick yellow slices into jars. Each day there were new things to pick or put up out of Fern’s garden. It didn’t seem much like work; Fern somehow made it all fun and interesting. Later on, I got a lot of satisfaction knowing that I’d helped fill those shelves in the cold cellar with shining jars of golden peaches, red tomato juice, green and yellow string beans, and blueberry jam.
But that wasn’t the only way Fern and I captured the summer. She showed me how to take fresh flower blossoms and press and dry them in a book so they’d keep forever. When I wrote a letter to a friend, Fern helped me glue the pressed flowers onto my writing paper to make it pretty.
Some days she’d get out watercolors, brushes, and a couple of tablets and we’d try our hand at capturing scenes of our Amish neighbors cutting hay with their teams of horses. Or we’d go out after supper and paint the sunset in swirls of purple, gold, and crimson. We’d sit on the porch swing in the evenings and watch the stars come out. It was then that Fern would share her faith with me in a way that made the fifty-year-span in our ages seem insignificant. I pondered our conversations and packed those memories deep in my heart.
That summer was the beginning of a friendship that would last a dozen years, until the day we put Fern’s body in the ground and her soul went on to be with Jesus. Sometimes the sight of an amber-colored wheat field or a brilliant salmon-pink sunset will take me back to that time, that summer when Fern captured my twelve-year-old heart… that summer when Fern’s loving ways assured me of my place in the Twells family and in the family of God.
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Fiction
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