get his newspaper and found her huddled on the front step nearly blue with cold. She had ridden her bicycle the few short blocks over from their house at dawn to make sure she wouldn’t miss anything.
These days, the other girls don’t climb out of bed much before midmorning, and Annie Sue is still the first one here even though she now has the longest drive. Her new white electrician’s truck rolled into the yard as Dwight was pouring himself a third cup of coffee.
“Actually, I’m going to do some work today,” she said with a grin when Dwight teased her that she just wanted to show off the truck’s redesigned logo. “Reese is coming over later to help me install your new aff-sees.”
“The what-sees?” I looked at Dwight.
He shrugged.
Annie Sue spelled it out for us. “A-F-C-I’s. Short for arc fault circuit interrupters. Circuit breakers.”
“Why do we need new circuit breakers? This house is only three years old.”
“Because they weren’t required when Dad wired you up. These babies will trip the breaker if there’s a frayed or exposed wire and maybe keep your house from catching fire. I’m putting them in all the bedrooms here on the farm. The state requires them in new construction even though the Home Builders Association bitched and yelled about the extra cost.”
“So how much
“No more than sixty or eighty dollars.”
I was surprised. “That’s all? Then why’s the Builders Association fighting it?”
“Beats me,” Annie Sue said. “They’re a lot cheaper than the granite counters and designer upgrades the builders are always pushing, and those don’t save lives. That’s why come Reese and I are doing it at cost for all the family. I’ll get started here this afternoon but we have to fit it in around the rest of our work and deer season.”
Dwight raised his eyebrows at that. “What’s deer season got to do with it?”
She shook her head with a rueful smile. “You know Reese. He said he saw the tracks of a big buck down at Uncle Haywood’s end of the long pond last weekend, so it’s hard to keep him focused.”
“Tell him we’ll take the tenderloin off his hands,” Dwight said as he picked up his keys and put on his jacket.
“Anyhow, I’ll need a key so we can finish up on Monday or Tuesday when we’re out this way. A lot of people are getting electrical appliances for Christmas, so we’re real busy.”
Annie Sue began taking courses at Colleton Community long before she graduated from high school last spring. When she passed the state test and earned her electrician’s license back in the summer, Herman officially changed the name of his electrical contracting business to
Or to take off and go hunting when he’s supposed to be on the clock.
Even though she’s now holding down an adult job and drawing adult wages, Annie Sue wasn’t quite ready to give up making Christmas cookies, and she helped me clear away the breakfast things and get out the baking utensils while Dwight and Cal went to pick up Mary Pat and Jake.
Because Kate lets Cal go there after school on the weekdays, we try to give her a break by taking the two older children on Saturdays.
They trooped into the kitchen, red-cheeked and ready to measure and mix while Dwight took our weekly accumulation of trash and recyclables to the neighborhood disposal center a few miles away. All three of them wanted to crack an egg and I tried not to wince when flecks of shell went into the bowl or when Jake’s egg slipped out of his hands and splatted on the floor. After they cut out and decorated several gingerbread men, I showed them how to use drinking straws to punch holes in the stiff dough so that they could later add a loop of red yarn after baking and hang their creations on the Christmas tree.
When the cookies had cooled enough, Annie Sue helped each boy pipe his name in white icing across the fragrant chest of his best effort. Mary Pat insisted on doing hers by herself. Eventually, there would be a personalized gingerbread man for every member of the family, and these would act as place cards for our big Christmas dinner at the homeplace. This was something Mother had done when I was a child, and when I came back to Colleton County I claimed it as my own contribution to the family feasts.
By the time Seth’s daughter Jess, Andrew’s Ruth, and Zach’s Emma arrived, the kitchen was fragrant with cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. They quickly shed their jackets, washed their hands, and plunged in.
Once there were no more eggs to crack, Cal and Jake soon grew bored and wandered outside to help Dwight unload the empty trash cans and recycling bins and put them back in the garage, but Mary Pat decided she wanted to hang with the girls, especially since they had brought along Melissa, my brother Robert’s eleven-year-old granddaughter.
Ruth was all around the kitchen with her digital camera, documenting our baking session for a “Christmas on the Farm” album she planned to make for Daddy. He refuses to have anything to do with computers and misses out on the uploaded photos the rest of us share back and forth. He wants color prints he can hold in his hands. Emma’s our computer whiz and she and Ruth keep saying that one of these days they’re going to take all the old photo albums that are cornflaking on a shelf at the homeplace and put them on a DVD.
We had finished with the gingerbread men and moved on to Mexican wedding cakes rolled in powdered sugar and heavily decorated sugar cookies when Haywood’s Jane Ann walked into the kitchen lugging a large navy duffel bag with a navy, gold, and white UNCG logo on the side.
“I’m not too late for the bourbon balls, am I?” she cried as the others rushed to hug her. “I got here quick as I could.” There were dark circles under her sleepy blue eyes.
“You’re just now getting home?” I asked, eyeing her duffel bag. “I thought you guys were due in last night.”
“Yeah, well, Stevie made it, but today was the absolute deadline for one of my term papers,” she confessed. “I
