A surprising service

The scent of my mom’s home-made “vertabrod” was wafting into my room on a wave of warm air as I woke up from my afternoon nap. My bedroom was filled with sunlight shining in from the windows lining three walls of the spacious, upstairs dwelling my parents built for me. I was in highschool and getting ready to leave home to go sail the seas by the time the room was finished. Until then, my bedrooms had been little attic-like spaces under the eaves. I am actually pretty good with small spaces, making them into cozy little nests, but by the time I had reached the end of highschool, I had too much stuff for my tower/loft above the living room and I was so excited to be able to explode into my new room in the addition.

The floor is all wide, pine boards, and the walls are plastered and then painted a peachy-pink color that my mom and I mixed in “milk paint”. When I was home for Thanksgiving last month, I removed the screens and got through cleaning half my windows. I guess the nice thing about having the job only half done is that now I appreciate the clean ones more. I’ll probably get around to the other half of them next spring right before we put the screens back on.

As I lay there visualizing the warm Swedish tea rings that my mom would be pulling out of the oven soon, I heard my Uncle’s and Aunt’s voices at the door. It was the day before Christmas and they had walked through the woods to deliver our presents: a screech owl house for my mom and dad, and a pair of slightly bulged envelopes for my brother and I.

The topic of conversation was the recent memorial service for my great aunt, the late Peggy Jones (my mother’s namesake, though the first was her great Aunt Margaret, I think.) My uncle Curry had chosen the Presbyterian church because he didn’t see eye to eye with the minister at the Episcopalian church. The Presbyterian minister turned out to be quite the evangelical; He requested 15 minutes of the funeral service to speak and spent that whole time trying to convert them to the church. Apparently my mom and her cousin were laughing so hard they were crying, and crying so hard they were shaking their pew. And her cousin’s husband just wondered why they there were quite so moved at that part of the ceremony. My grandma said later on that it was the sort of thing that made you just want to get up and leave. Uncle Curry said to his daughter, “You’d be surprised how much your mom would have liked that service”, and Carol said, “Yes, you’re right, I would be surprised.”

It’s funny how there are things that I look forward to all year long, like our Swedish tea ring for Christmas breakfast, and fresh tomato pie in the summer, and grape jelly in the autumn, and I wonder, would Vertabrod ever taste quite as good if we had it one morning in August, or would tomato pie be quite as delicious if I made it once every couple of weeks?