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FlashNano2024 Day 12 Write a story including a family recipe

Outside the November wind blew the remaining colored leaves off the trees. Inside the kitchen was warm with the four women, pans, mason jars and ingredients for the relish.The oldest was 18, the youngest 16.

Jenny thought the annual relish-making day was more like a coven of women. There was Great Granny Anne, her self, Anne's daughter and Jenny's daughter Frances. But this year, Frances’s daughter Alice was joining for the first tim.

Alice thought this was a almost a right of passage..

Everything they would need was set out on the wooden kitchen table that had seen so many meals prepared by Granny Anne: baked beans, potato salad, oatmeal bread and more. They had cranked the ice cream maker until their arms hurt.

Great Granny Anne handed her great granddaughter Alice one of the two peelers and the click-click-click didn’t stop until all 16 large cucumbers were skin-free.

The buzz of the grinder drowned out Beethoven’s Ninth. Francis had put it almost on mute. “I’ll turn it up for Ode to Joy” she said. That too was part of the tradition that went back to Great Granny Anne doing it with Jenny and then Frances when each turned 16. Now Alice was 16.

The cucumbers were put in a strainer. Alice was told to sprinkle them with four tablespoons salt. “Don’t stir,” Great Granny Anne and Frances said together. “We now wait two hours: put the kettle on.”

Frances had made bird cookies or rather sugar cookies shaped with a cookie cutter that had belonged to a great aunt from sometime a little after the Civil war. The cookies were still warm from the oven and Alice, who ordinarily didn’t drink tea enjoyed pouring the liquid from the blue teapot and sipping two cups along with eating four cookies starting at the tail and nibbling up to the head.

The two-hour timer dinged and the three women who had spent the two last hours telling stories, stood up to continue work. Alice had never heard any of the stories. That her mother, grandmother and Great Grandmother has marched in demonstrations for women’s vote, the equal rights amendment and the right to have an abortion made her think of the older women in her life in a totally different way.

Into a big pan often used for spaghetti sauce went six cups of vinegar, one cup of water, seven cups of sugar and four tablespoons of turmeric. “Be careful,” Great Granny Anne said, “It stains.”

“My Mom says that every year. It’s part of the tradition,” Jenny said.

“I know,” Francis said. “I wait to hear it every year.”

Two teaspoons of ginger, one of salt and two cups of water were added next.

“It smells good,” Alice said as the mixture boiled for five minutes.

“Put it into the boiled mason jars,” Frances said. “Right Mom?”

Granny Anne was busy putting the sealed jars into a huge pan of water.  “Alice, we will boil them for 15 minutes to sterilize them and we’re done.”

At the end of the day, the jars were divided between the households.

“Next year can I do it with your guys again?” Alice asked.

“Of course, “the three other women chorused..