The summer she turned 15 she visited the aunts for much longer than she usually did. Instead of spending a week with them she spent months.
When the visit started she had been concerned about her parents and what her life was going to be like when she went home again, and though those thoughts were still in her head they were being mostly drowned out with other thoughts. Thoughts about baking. And house construction. And gardening. And reading. And stargazing. And...well everything that she could soak up.
Looking back at that time she wasn't sure if she had decided to immerse herself in everything about her aunts and their house because she was embarrassed for never asking questions before or if her aunts had decided to fill her head with so much information she didn't have time to think about what her parents were doing. She had finally decided that it didn't really matter why it had happened, she was just glad that it had.
Working in the kitchen with Aunt Gloria she learned that the trick to making biscuits that were light and fluffy and tender and perfect was to pay too much attention to the flour and very little attention at all to the flour. To make sure a cookie is sweet you had to add the right amount of salt. These were the sorts of directions that Aunt Gloria gave while cooking. And finally Stacy understood why her mother, when she would attempt to cook at home, was never successful. She would remember half of the instructions or think that she had to have misheard them since they were contradictory. So her very few attempts at things like biscuits in her own kitchen resulted in hard pucks of dough instead of the float away light and flaky bites of heaven her Aunt Gloria could make.
Pay too much attention to the flour. Make sure you use the right flour, King Arthur was the best. Then sift it. Then sift it again. But once you added in the shortening, always by hand to get the right feel, never a mixer, then you needed to barely touch it. Mix it like you didn't really care if it was mixed at all. Pay too much attention to the flour. Then pay very little attention at all to the flour. You had to add salt to fully taste the sweet. Salt enhances flavors. Without salt you don't get the real sweet unless you add so much sugar it gets cloying. A little bit of salt and the sweetness pops.
It was all very simple really. If you understood what Aunt Gloria was telling you.
She worked with Aunt Bets to plan a new section of the garden. They researched shade plants. Things that would bloom, fruit and flourish without direct sunlight. They plotted out the garden measuring rows and thinking of how things would grow over the years. How much room would a plant need in three years? In five? In ten? You had to keep that in mind when planting if you didn't want to have to tear out your garden and start over. While they were in the yard making their plans Stacy looked up at the bright sky and back down at the piece of land and asked, "Why are we planning for shade here? This is direct sun."
Aunt Bets nodded, "That's a very good question, and it only took you a week to ask."
Stacy smiled and laughed, "Well, I wasn't thinking about that part. I was thinking about the growing and the planning."
"A good lesson for you. Don't get wrapped up in the future and forget about the present." Then Aunt Bets continued to measure space for her flowers.
Stacy kept taking notes for a little bit and then paused, "You didn't answer my question though, did you?"
"Good. It didn't take you nearly as long this time."
Aunt Perry came out of the house with some lemonade, "Don't tease her too much or she won't want to help you later."
"Oh you're no fun. Here, look up there and tell me what you see." Aunt Bets pointed above them.
"The sky. Some clouds. There's a bird..." Stacy knew she was missing something.
Aunt Bets came behind her and placed a hand on each side of her head and guided it to the side and tilted down a bit. "Now what?"
She looked and, "Oh! What is that?"
There was a platform on the side of the house. Not much space at all, maybe five or six feet wide. But a definite platform.
"That's the start of the next part of the house. There is a matching branch on the other side. Or that's what they are going to be. I see two branches coming out from the garden and those will be..." she trailed off. "Well I'm not sure yet. I just know we will need those rooms for something. So I've started the plans now. You should never wait until you know what you need to make sure you have what you need."
"Are we going to start on that this summer?"
"Well, part of we already started or there wouldn't be a platform. But I'm not sure how much more we will get done this summer. Fall is a better time for building. The spring and summer are full of growth already. There isn't nearly as much competition in the fall."
"That and she likes to lay around in the afternoon with a glass of lemonade and a good book in the summer." Aunt Perry laughed.
"That too! And with that you are free from helping me for the rest of the day. I've got an appointment with a dashing detective and his trusty crime solving dog!"
Stacy laughed, "I don't think I've read that one."
"Well of course not, I'm still writing it."
Stacy was too shocked to even answer. Her aunt wrote books?
Aunt Perry stretched, "I think I'll climb a tree and head to the library, what do you think?"
Stacy was excited, she had been waiting to tell her Aunt Perry the news, "I finished!"
"You finished what?"
"Every book in the library, I finished yesterday." She was grinning from ear to ear.
"Well this I have to see!"
And so Stacy and Aunt Perry climbed the tree and headed into the library where Stacy found her bookmark had been moved back to the low wall and the very first book. "Oh you already knew!" She had hoped to surprise her aunt. But when she walked over to the small side of the room and pulled out her book mark she realized these were not the books she had read. She followed the wall all along the room from the lowest side to the tallest. As far as she could tell every single book was different. "How..."
Aunt Perry smiled at her, "The secret to a good library is never running out of books."
And so the summer went. Stacy made progress in the library. She learned how to cook. She learned how to plan a garden. She even did some sketches for how she envisioned the new branches of the house and what she thought might fit in those rooms. She also learned that her Aunt Bets had been the first of her family to go to college. Though she hadn't finished when she realized that most college instructors were like Stacy's father and full of can'ts and shoulds ("no offense dear, but he's always been a bit of a fuss") and Bets was much more interested in why nots and how comes.
She learned that Aunt Gloria had met all of her husbands at Farmers' Markets, yet not a single one of them had been a farmer. She also learned that going to the Farmers' Market with her Aunt Gloria still consisted of multiple men offering to buy her fruit or a coffee or a ranch in Montana. "There is just something about a Farmers' Market that makes men feel generous."
She learned that Aunt Perry went once a week to Sarah's grave site and told her about everything going on in the world. The whole world. And she got it all done in a half hour. "It helps that she keeps up with things. I only have to tell her a few things she might have missed. And we have a great shorthand, most long term relationships do, you know."
And at the end of the summer when her parents came to pick her up she realized that no matter what they had decided she would be fine. And she was.
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