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Show Peppermint Monday if Uncle William became a U.S. Senator. j agreed with Grandma Ruby. Everyone had gone a little crazy. Grandma Ruby had been baking and the whole house smelled like her delicious bread. Andrea and I could smell it even before we reached her porch. I've tasted a lot of homemade bread and a lot of fresh bakery bread in my fourteen years, but nobody else's bread ever came close to tasting as good as Grandma Ruby's. She knew it too, which gave her ego a lift. We sat around her small, kitchen table talking about Barton making everybody crazyand eating Ruby's bread smothered with globs of butter. Grandma Ruby used to make her own butter too, but gave up milking a cow a few years ago. Now she bought her butter from Chester's place like everybody else. We bought our margarine from Chester's too. Chocolate-chip cookies are probably not any worse on a diet than hot bread. At least not the way Andrea ate it. She put on a lot of butter and even more jam. Grandma Ruby made mouth-watering jam too. Andrea was eating wild strawberry, but that was one of Grandma's tamer flavors. She had used just about every kind of known fruit in her jam making. My favorite was apple-rhubarb. We'd finished the last jar on her last baking day, so I had to settle for black raspberry. It was good too. "Grandma Ruby," I said jokingly. "What kind of jam haven't you made?" Grandma smiled the way she always did when she was thinking of her childhood. It was the same sort of smile ma used when she was thinking of Chicago. I'd heard as many of Grandma's stories as I had ma's. Grandma had an interesting childhood and we loved to listen to her talk about it. I don't think exciting things like that ever happened to ma in Chicago. "Once when I was eight I collected as many dandelions as I could hold |
