Sue loves holidays
She scared the livin’ daylight out of us every Halloween
smeared with green grease paint and stooped over
Of course when we bit into the cinnamony red homemade candy apple
we knew it had been Sue under the wicked-witch-of-the-west pointy hat
Business was business at Christmas
There were 50 gingerbread houses to make for charity
With assembly line efficiency, the serious, well-behaved children were invited
to decorate doors and build ribbon candy fences and sugar cube chimneys (my favorite job)
Easter was all fun and games
Rain or shine or snow, the cleaned out egg shells from her MANY baking projects
were carefully filled with confetti and painted and hidden in the four corners of her yard
There were always dozens in the woodpile, more near the duck yard (enter at your own risk!)
There seemed to be thousands of them, Sue claims only hundreds
Families caught up on the news after being shut in over the winter and the kids ran wild
Confetti was everywhere—and in everyone’s hair–especially in Sue’s
By the next year only a few bits of the biodegradable confetti were still visible among the blades of grass
Sunny Sundays we had lemonade, frigid Easters we sipped cocoa
And we ATE COOKIES—as many as we could
Many of the old gang returned over the years to watch our kids run among the blizzard of confetti
And we ate cookies—as many as we could
Sue made the best cookies in town
But it took tasting pastries in Paris to realize that Sue’s cookies were (and are)
THE BEST IN THE WORLD.
She wrote all the recipes in a book for me — “You can make them”
On Easter perhaps–with Sue on my shoulder (she always will be)