Christmas With the Colburns by Keely Brooke Keith

Author:Keely Brooke Keith [Keith, Keely Brooke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B016KRCXNS
Goodreads: 27249383
Publisher: Edenbrooke Press
Published: 2015-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

At midnight Lydia crawled into bed, weary from a long day. Raindrops hit the window with an arrhythmic tink tink tink that made her wish it would either commit to downpour or stop altogether. Instead of putting out her lamp, she slid it close to the edge of her bedside table and opened her mother’s journal. So far, the sadness of her mother’s predicament had only reinforced her own. Still, she yearned to read another page of the story.

Mrs. Colburn handed me a beige apron that had a pink rose embroidered on the collar. She said it was mine to keep and insisted I call her Violet when the men weren’t around. She was always busy in the house or the garden or the kitchen and kept me with her from chore to chore.

I liked the work. She had a tip or trick to make everything easier or better. At first I thought she was inventing projects to keep me occupied so that I’d forget about my troubles, but she wasn’t. She did everything out of genuine love for her family and her home.

Two days before Christmas, she started preparing the food. She said she made the same feast every year, even when it would be only Mr. Colburn, John, and Mr. Colburn’s blind sister, Isabella, and herself at the dinner table. It seemed extravagant to spend two days cooking for four people, but she said as the overseer’s wife, she never knew who else might join them and she wanted to be prepared. Some Christmases travelers needed hospitality, and some Christmases people were alone and she invited them over. Since I fit into both of those categories, I smiled and continued pitting cherries for the salad recipe she was teaching me.

Isabella sat at the table, snapping green beans. She had a funny way of being so quiet for so long, I’d forget she was around, and then she’d interject some comment proving she listened to every word spoken in the Colburn house.

As I worked on the cherries, Violet made the sauce at the cook stove. “Beat two eggs in your saucepan with a wooden spoon like so, and then add one cup of sugar and one cup of heavy whipping cream.” She scraped every drip of cream out of the cup. “The trick is to keep stirring the sauce on medium heat for about fifteen minutes. For the perfect cherry salad, you’ll want the sauce thick, but be careful not to burn it.”

My fingers were tired by the time I’d finished pitting thirty ounces of cherries, but the smell of the warm sweet sauce assured me the work would be worth it. I carried the bowl of cherries to Violet. “When do we mix these into the sauce?”

She wagged a finger at me and moved the saucepan from the cook stove to a potholder on the countertop. “Oh, not for hours. We have to let the sauce and the cherries chill before we mix them together. And we’ll mix in a cup of crushed walnuts then too.

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