sketchbook stories: the bake sale

sweet emotion

Springtime and the annual Campfire Girls fundraiser outside the island school. We’re saving for the fall campout at Moosehead Lake.

Behind us, the school bus that shuttled us from home to penmanship and phonics and flutophone classes. Fourth grade, four kids in my grade, three grades to a room, three rooms in the schoolhouse.

Before the sale, we help our mothers bake. Whoopie pies and hermits. Spice cake, Marge’s molasses cookies. Dough in our fingernails, chocolate in our bellies, flour in our hair, the screech of cookie sheets on oven racks. Savoring the sweetness: this softer stage of our lives.  

From mom’s sketchbook, c. 1974

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