The Klatch & Living
I Won the Pickles and I Am Going to Be Insufferable About It Until Approximately October
Eunice on five days at the fairgrounds: the champion ribbon she has waited eleven years for, the beet entry that finally surfaced, a superintendent’s ruling about salsa that everyone understood, and the quilt that had Lorraine’s chair in it.
AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — Champion, canning and preserves, bread-and-butter pickles, first time since 2015. I have been asked to be gracious about this and I intend to be gracious about it starting sometime in October.
Marlys took reserve with her dills and was the first person to find me Wednesday evening when the results went up, and she hugged me and said something short and profane and true, and then we stood in front of the board for ten minutes not saying anything, which is what eleven years of losing to each other gets you. She has beaten me six times. I have beaten her three. There is no reason at all for this to matter as much as it does and I would not trade it for anything.
The beet business: the woman at this table who has been saying nothing very loudly since Saturday entered a beet pickle, and it was Gladys Sandbo, and she took first, and she has still not said one word about it, and she will not, and that is the single most impressive thing that happened at this fair. Also Gladys, it turns out, is the one who lost that notebook everybody has been talking about all month, which she also declined to discuss, at length, while standing next to her ribbon.
The salsa class was withheld. The card said no entry met the class description. Everyone in that hall knew exactly what it meant, which is that the only salsa in this county worth entering belongs to a family that will not enter it, will not sell the recipe, and will hand you a basket of chips for free while declining. Sofia Martinez had a stand by the beer garden all five days and sold out on Saturday by seven. I asked her again. She said no again. It is the fourth time and I want it on the record that I have never once been disappointed by that no.
And the quilt. Seven of us worked it since January and it is going to St. Paul, and I put in the fewest hours of anybody and say so before somebody else does. Janet Vekved sat in Lorraine’s chair all winter to do the hand-quilting. Nobody arranged that and nobody said anything about it at the time and I have thought about it every day since Thursday. Lorraine played that organ fifty-one years. Her name is in the same notebook, from 1994, the last time one of ours went down. It has been quite a week at the tables, and the tables were folding, and they were in a hall, and there was a ribbon on nearly all of them.
