The Good-bye Present

“What have you got?” my friend asked when she opened her front door.

I grinned and handed her a pan of iced cinnamon rolls. “I thought your family might like something to snack on while they worked.”

Karen was moving that week, so I had baked cinnamon rolls, bringing Kami along with me to deliver them.

“Oh, Gale,” Karen exclaimed, “they look delicious!”

“Yes they do,” Joseph, her twelve year-old son agreed as he joined his mother at the door.“Hey, Kami,” he added, grinning at my daughter. They were the same age, and had been friends for the past five years. “Can we have one, mom?”

“Sure,” his mother laughed, as Joseph grabbed the pan out of his mother's hand.

“What can I do to help you pack?” I asked Karen as I surveyed the the living room stacked high with un-assembled boxes.

“There really isn't anything, yet,” Karen claimed. “The movers are coming tomorrow, and they will pack everything for us. All I'll have to do is supervise, then clean when they are done.”

“Can I help you clean?” I asked.

“Well, if you really want to, but you've done enough just bringing the rolls.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Joseph said as he and Kami walked back into the living room, carrying cinnamon rolls on paper plates. He grinned at me, then stuffed a huge corner of roll into his mouth.

His grin faded as his eyes grew wide and a look of surprised distaste appeared on his face. “Yuck!” he said as he spit a mouthful of roll out on the plate. “What's in these?”

Karen looked at her son with a horrified look on her face, embarrassed at his rudeness, but Kami was spitting on her plate, too.

“Mom! What did you do to these rolls?”

“I don't know,” I said in confusion, looking between the two kids. “What's the matter with them?”

“Salt,” Kami and Joseph said in unison, wiping their mouths with their hands. “They're awful mom,” Kami added.

Karen and I looked at each other, then I reached out and took a tiny bit of Kami's roll and put it in my mouth.

“Uhggg!” It really was disgusting.

“I'm so sorry,” I apologized. “I don't know what happened, but these are disgusting.”

“I bet I know,” Kami told me with a wicked grin on her face. “Krissi's been trying to do practical jokes all week. I bet she added salt to the dough.”

“She wouldn't do that,” I defended my youngest daughter. But honestly, I couldn't think of any explanation for how salt got into my rolls.

In the end, Joseph and Kami discovered they could eat the top part of the rolls, the frosting was fine, but they threw the rest of them away.

I went home and tried to figure out what happened to my rolls.

“Krisann,” I called my ten year-old daughter to come into the kitchen. “Do you know how salt got into the cinnamon rolls?”

“Well, maybe it was in the sugar,” she told me sheepishly. I opened the sugar canister and stuck my finer in to taste it. Sure enough, Salt!

“What did you do?” I demanded.

Krissi looked at me cautiously, trying to see just how mad I was, I guess. To tell you the truth, I was actually beginning to chuckle over the whole thing. It really was kind of funny. I guess Krissi could tell I wasn't too upset, because she finally admitted emptying a whole container of salt into my sugar. That darned girl!

In the end, I emptied out the sugar/salt mixture, filled the canister with just sugar, and made a new batch of cinnamon rolls. The next day I took Karen the good rolls, and spent the afternoon helping her clean her newly emptied house. We said goodbye to our friends that evening, knowing we would probably never be neighbors again.

“But when Karl retires,” I told Karen after my final hug, “you really should think about coming back to Arizona and moving up to Snowflake with us. I promise, I won't bring you salty cinnamon rolls as a moving in present.”

Woods Canyon Lake

           Driving to Woods Canyon Lake for the day was always an exciting thing to do when we were up at the cabin.  The lake is one of the biggest natural lakes in Arizona, right on top of the rim, surrounded by a dense forest of tall ponderosa pines, firs, oaks and aspen trees.  People in the Valley love to take the three hour drive up to Woods Canyon lake during the summer just to get out of the heat, and many people bring their tents and trailers and spend the week in the campgrounds. 

            From the cabin it only took us about an hour to drive over the dirt road, and then another half hour to drive up on top of the rim to the lake.  Sometimes family would drive up from the Valley to meet us there for the afternoon.

            One day we met Aunt Ejvor’s family at Woods Canyon Lake.  It was extra fun for us to spend the day with them.  Tina was my best friend, and Richard and Keith were close to the same age and had fun together.  Aunt Ejvor had older children, too, and we thought they were so cool!  We shuffled kids around on the drive back down the rim so friends could ride with each other.  Linda and I got to ride ride in Aunt Ejvor's car, with Tina.  Her big sister Clara was our oldest cousin, an almost grown up teenager!  She sat in the front seat of their station wagon, and we were really impressed when she stuck her bare feet out of the window, letting the wind whip around them and through the car, cooling us all down. 

            A few days later, when we were on our way home from the cabin, Linda and I tried to do the same thing, but Mom told us to get our feet inside the car right now!  It sure didn't seem fair.  How come Clara could get away with it, but us kids couldn't? .

            A few years later we met Aunt Amy and her family at the lake for another summer picnic.  They were renting a cabin in Pine for a week, a small vacation town on the other side of Payson.  We spent an enjoyable morning picnicking and fishing, but a big storm rolled in early in the afternoon, so we had to call it a day.  It rained on us hard all the way down the rim, and by the time we reached the turn off to the cabin the road was slick and muddy.  Dad and Uncle Joe pulled both cars into the pull off on the side of the road and talked to each other through the windows, while the rain pelted down us.  Dad was worried about the road into the cabin, with this much rain it would be nearly impossible to drive over the slick spots.  Aunt Amy and Uncle Joe invited us to stay with them in their cabin at Pine, but we hadn't brought any clothes or food, other than what we packed for the picnic, and Mom didn't want to be a bother.  Dad kept thinking the storm would let up soon, but after another half hour of pounding rain he finally told Mom we'd better not chance it.  We thought it was way exciting to get to follow Aunt Amy and Uncle Joe to Pine and stay with them for the night. 

             We didn’t have pajamas or tooth brushes, but we borrowed old t-shirts from our older cousins.  Mom and Aunt Amy ran into the grocery store in Payson and bought stuff for our dinner, and we had a fun evening visiting and playing games with everybody.  When it was time for bed we made beds on the floor of their A-frame cabin.  We had never seen a cabin like that before.  There seemed to be no side walls, just a very steep roof that reached all the way to the ground and came together high above the cabin in a peak. 

             In the morning Dad and Uncle Joe made breakfast for everyone while we took a walk to see what their woods looked like.  It was pretty, but not nearly as beautiful as our creek and woods at the cabin.  It seemed kind of hard to say good by after spending so much time together, and kind of lonely in the car ride back to the cabin, but the road had dried out enough for us to get by without slipping and sliding off the side, and we were happy to finally get home to our own clothes, our own toothbrushes, and our own cabin.