A Treatise on Pickles, Patience and Bread

These days, it’s not the spilt glasses of milk that make me cry. It’s the shattered jars of pickles.

I’m pregnant. I need those pickles.

Yet somehow, when I pulled that 1-gallon glass jar off the shelf at Sam’s Club and placed it in my cart, I just knew that it was an accident waiting to happen. Call it my mother’s intuition; call it my destiny; call it my son’s slippery fingers.

I just knew that jar would end up broken.

In Joe’s defense, the lid was not put back on properly after I sampled my first gargantuan pickle. In Joe’s defense, it was technically my fault. None of this mattered, though, when—inevitably—he dropped it.

I’d warned him to be careful when he took the pickles out to the garage. I’d said the words! Be careful. Yet when I saw his face as he reentered the kitchen, I knew my beloved gallon jar was gone.

And I was angry.

I swept past him to view the damage firsthand—a dill-scented train wreck, as it were—but the first thing I saw when I opened the door was my husband’s face…and the first thing I heard were his calm words:

“Maggie, get a dust pan.”

In an instant, my anger dissolved. That’s how powerful my husband’s non-reaction was.

I returned to the kitchen where my son stood defeated. Wrapping an arm around his shoulder, I said, “Did I ever tell you about one of my favorite books?”

The name of the book was Ginnie and the Cooking Contest by Catherine Woolley—Have you read it?—and oh, how I loved that book! I checked it out from our local library again and again—that one and its companion, Ginnie’s Babysitting Business, which I also liked but not quite as much.

“In this book Ginnie and the Cooking Contest,” I explained to Joe, “There was a pickle mine.”

His eyebrows went up—a mixed reaction of curiosity and interest, same as mine the first time I read about it.

“There was a delivery truck carrying a load of pickles and it crashed,” I told him. “Hundreds of jars of pickles tumbled out, and eventually they were covered by mud and dirt on this old dirt road. The locals would go and strike the ground with their shovels. They’d hit glass; a jar of pickles!”

At that point, of course, my husband opened the garage door and yelled in, “Where’s my dust pan?!” Joe scurried back out to help him clean up…

…and I went online to find this book.

In Him and with Him and through Him and for Him,