Storytelling Starters ~ The Shopping List
WIPs is the name we give to a group to which I belong. There’s no flagellation involved. WIPs stands for Works in Progress. Today, 30th November, we are having a long Saturday session in which all kinds of different things will be presented – songs, readings, piano pieces, a cello piece, some pots which one of our members has made, a sculpture another is creating and a piano duet that has been newly composed by the same group-member who is playing the cello.
For my part, I’ll be reading Shopping List, the story I mentioned last week. At the end of it (which will be just before tea), I’ll be asking the group if they can work out from the story what the shopping list had on it. For me, the experience will be a test of how well my story held their attention. For it’s a very true thing – it’s almost a storyteller’s rule – that you certainly won’t remember what you didn’t listen to in the first place.
Last week I said I’d include Shopping List in this week’s blog. But since the whole thing is four pages long in total, I’ll confine my offering to the first section. I do hope you enjoy it. I should add that it’s part fiction, part childhood memory, part current life. Items from the shopping list are in RED.
The Shopping List Story:
It was early, but not THAT early, and already it felt like there was too much to do.
‘Christmas,’ she thought. ‘That’s the problem! Christmas cake or no Christmas cake? Cards in the post or just emails? Presents for family and friends or not? Far too many decisions.’
She put down her mug with a clatter and went and pulled Delia out of the shelf. She opened it to the recipe she normally used.
But of course, she thought, any Christmas cake worth its salt should have been made by now. It’s already the end of November. Her mother would have done it, that was for sure. Nonetheless, she read down the list of ingredients, mentally checking which ones she had in her cupboards, which ones would have to go on her shopping list. That’s if she decided to go ahead with it.
By the time she’d got to Icing, she’d completely made up her mind. ‘No, no, no! It’s too much. No Christmas cake. It only gives us indigestion.’
Quickly she got up from her chair again, filled up the kettle, got out another tea-bag and made a second mug of tea.
‘Just focus on today,’ she thought. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Now write yourself your shopping list.’
So why, oh why, was she so resistant to starting? What was it about Saturday mornings? Was it the dream of an unpressurised life where shopping didn’t have to happen and the day could feel like your own, with lunch in a nice café perhaps, then a walk by the river and later a film?
Even as she thought milk, yes MILK, her mind had started to wander. On Granny’s farm, milk didn’t have to be bought. It was already there, literally close to hand.
Once, she remembered, she’d begged to be allowed to have a go. At last, a bucket was brought and she sat herself down on Grandpa’s three-legged stool. Betsy had never felt so near and enormous, looming over her as she took hold of one of the teats and moved her hands down it in the way Grandpa showed her. It was hard, she’d never realised that. Then suddenly, after a great deal of striving, a spurt of milk streamed into the bucket.
‘Milk!’ she’d called out. ‘I’m doing it, Grandpa!’ But that’s when Betsy stepped backwards, the bucket went flying, her stool toppled over and she was suddenly lying on the floor of the cowshed crying: ‘I don’t want to do it no more.’
Never mind. She’d never stopped loving Betsy or the regular rhythms of the small homestead life.
Going to fetch eggs, for instance. She’d never tired of that. Round the back of the cowshed were the wooden boxes where the eggs got laid. You’d lift the lid slightly, the sweet smell of straw would come out and when you pushed your hand inside and felt this way and that, there it would be, the smooth, warm oval of an egg. Yes EGGS – medium-sized eggs. Not too big. Not too small. Just right for a small person’s hand to get hold of, just right to go in the basket, just right for a small person’s tea. Boiled, with soldiers for dipping ready on the plate around it.
‘And butter’ she thought. ‘Yes, BUTTER.’ Now that was something else, no-one today would believe it. The endless churning, the hard work of it all, and then the brilliant result: the firm square slab of gorgeous golden butter, unsalted (her grandmother didn’t do salted).
‘Funny how life moves on,’ she silently muttered as she downed the last drops of her second mug of tea and quickly got up from her chair. ‘Now I’ll go and have my shower…………’
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Of course, the story goes on to include all the other items on the list that my friend had sent me. That friend is part of our WIPs group. I wonder if he’ll recognise his list, by now several weeks old, when I read out the story. We’ll see!
PS: In case you couldn’t work it out, my top picture is of a bottle of milk in my fridge. The other one is of a first – the first pack of just 4 eggs I’ve ever had.
Tags: butter, eggs, milk, shopping list story, WIPs