A Different Kind of Prize

July, fair time, was more stressful than the holidays. Last year, their first, the kids each won a blue ribbon. Emily won for a photo, a lucky shot of her brother, taken at the park. John won for a castle built of locking blocks. Anne feared that they would expect to win blue ribbons again this year and imagined tantrums from the younger kid and tears from the older one when they saw red, white, and blue “participant” ribbons.

Grandma had decided that this year the whole family would participate in the fair, and was entering every category of handmade greeting card and a few scrapbook pages. Anne’s sister, Holly, was entering every category of scrapbook pages and a few greeting cards.

It was Anne’s job to make sure John and Emily did their best and had the supplies, the time and inspiration to work on their projects. Anne also felt it her job to make sure her mother and sister got their registrations turned in on time, exhibit tags attached properly, and followed all the other guidelines since this was their first year. She had learned a few things the hard way last year.

John couldn't produce a painting that was up to his standards so Anne bought tempera and water guns. She filled the water guns with tempera and turned him loose in the yard with the paint guns and paper. All she got for this effort was a very angry paint-splattered cat and a gray-brown puddle of paint on the paper. Emily wasn't doing much better. The paintings weren't going to win any blue ribbons.

John wanted to make a robot this year, so Anne frantically shopped for a large set of locking blocks. Hours after she brought the blocks home he built a house. What happened to the robot? The next day John destroyed the house, saying he didn’t want to enter it in the fair but only wanted to play with the blocks. Anne rushed back to the store and bought an even bigger set of blocks for a specific model. The instructions for building the model were over a hundred pages and John worked for five hours straight.

Emily was decorating a flowerpot as one of her entries. Anne dragged the kids to the craft store to look at mosaic tiles, paints, and stencils but Emily wasn’t interested in any of the supplies they saw. Then Emily spied a clay pot creations kit in the children’s crafts aisle. It had supplies inside to decorate five different clay pots so Anne bought it only to find out later that all the glazes inside were dried out and unusable. Anne realized that those little pots of glaze wouldn’t have been enough anyway, so it was back to the store to buy larger bottles of paint and a few other things her daughter wanted to decorate the pots.

Before this whole fair business Anne hadn’t realized there was nothing much she could do. She wasn’t into crafts like her mother and sister. Their cards and scrapbook pages were works of art. If Anne tried to make one it would look like a kindergarten project.

Grandma suggested she enter some of her writing. Maybe Grandma had never read any of her writing. It wasn’t family-friendly. Nor was it fiction. Her writing was true stories, told with humor, but it was more like George Carlin humor than Erma Bombeck humor. Anne’s writing was not the sort of stuff she could enter in the fair but she signed up for the writing category anyway.

Anne decided to enter the black walnut baking contests: she would adapt her favorite chocolate layer cake to include black walnuts. She’d try that reverse-creaming method she had read about to change the directions. She would add a touch of spices to complement the nuts. The black walnut cookies would be easy. The trouble would be deciding what type of cookie to make; she had so many delicious ideas in her head. What she didn’t expect was not finding black walnuts in any store.

Meanwhile, Grandma was keeping her busy. Grandma had signed up for scrapbook categories that she didn’t have the photos to make and was calling every day asking for copies of this photo or that photo to be mailed to her. She even called once to ask what pumpkins might say on a Halloween card.

Holly called to ask for photos from last year’s fair to make the scrapbook page of the fair that she had signed up for. The problem was that no one had taken any photos at the fair last year; they were too busy riding rides.

Anne finally breathed a sigh of relief on opening day. The projects had all been turned in. The family headed to the exhibit hall to see if they had won any ribbons. Grandma won several ribbons for her cards. Holly won several ribbons for her scrapbook pages. John won a blue ribbon for his locking blocks model again this year. Anne would have breathed another sigh of relief but now that John had won, it was even more important that Emily win something.

They rounded the corner and there it was; Emily’s photo of the cat in the Christmas tree had won a blue ribbon.

Anne hadn’t won anything. The frosting had slid off her cake. Maybe she wasn’t as good at baking as she thought. Her short story had been typed out the morning the entries were due and it showed. It was true; she wasn’t really good at anything.

Then she looked around her. Her children were beaming with pride. Emily was on her cell phone telling people about her blue ribbon. John was already planning next year’s block creation. Grandma and Holly were happy and planning next year’s entries.

Anne was good at something after all. It just wasn’t something she could put a tag on and enter in the fair.