The All You Can Dream Buffet

by Barbara O'Neal

  The four had come together nearly five years ago, over the course of a few months. Lavender had found a series on herbs that Ruby had written and contacted her, asking to use it on her blog, and they started to chat back and forth. Valerie contacted Lavender about wine and lavender pairings, just brainstorming, and she joined the group. Ginny had been the last addition. Her blog had barely begun to capture attention, and Ruby stumbled over it one night and invited Ginny to join the conversation with the others.

  At first they spoke mainly of the technical and marketing issues of blogging—how to manage “backbloggers,” the regular responders, who might try to take things over or stir up trouble; how to deal with the vagaries of blogging software; how to maximize views. Ruby and Ginny shared a love of good photos, though Ruby just liked to scour the Internet for hers. Valerie was their droll, worldly-wise voice. Lavender kept them laughing.

  Funny, Ruby thought now, yawning. Funny that they were so different and had become so much a part of one another’s lives across so much time and space. Three of them—Ruby, Lavender, and Valerie—had met only once in person. Ginny had not come to that gathering, and none of them had met her face-to-face.

  But it didn’t matter. The friendships were true and strong.

  She lazily clicked on Ginny’s “Cake of Dreams” and caught up on a couple of posts she’d missed. Valerie had not posted anything since her husband died two years ago, and Lavender still had the Blue Moon Festival posted. It would take place next weekend.

  Then, sleepy and with her guard down, she clicked on Google Maps and zoomed in on a Seattle address, then took the little man from the map and put it down on the street view, so she could admire the house. It was a two-story brick with a peaked roof and plenty of windows, some of which overlooked the Sound and the Olympic range in the distance. It was, she knew from her research, a prime Seattle neighborhood, so even though it was one of the smaller houses in the area, it was worth nearly a million dollars. Zillow told her that it was 4 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, with 3,540 square feet. Azaleas and boxwoods grew in front, and there was stained glass upstairs.

  Really, it was just creepy how much information you could get between Zillow and Google Maps. Stalker heaven.

  Ruby was not actually a stalker, however, because the house belonged to her mother. Or, rather, to her mother’s husband, because her mother was a stay-at-home mom to three soccer-playing kids, two girls and a boy, the youngest. She drove a mini-van, which was sometimes parked in the driveway in the photos. Once, electrifyingly, the satellite photo had captured Cammy herself, in lean blond perfection, carrying groceries into the house. The picture was so detailed that Ruby could read the Whole Foods Market logo on the recyclable grocery bags.

  That photo was long gone, but this one seemed pretty new. The lawns were green.

  Eased, Ruby exited the program and slid the laptop back into its place. She closed her eyes and imagined living in that back bedroom with corner windows overlooking the water, with the smell of food cooking in the kitchen and her mother’s voice talking on the phone.

  She slept.

  A Good Cake for Travel

  This is a homey little recipe, super-easy, that makes a sturdy coffee cake you can easily take with you on a picnic or in your trailer when you travel.

  Yes, EEEK! I’m leaving on my big adventure in the morning.

  Super-Easy Streusel Cake

  2 cups flour

  ½ cup sugar

  2 tsp baking powder

  ¾ tsp salt

  ½ tsp baking soda

  ⅓ cup butter, very soft

  1 beaten egg

  ½ cup buttermilk

  Topping

  ½ cup brown sugar

  2 tsp cinnamon

  2 T melted butter

  ½ cup chopped walnuts

  Measure the dry ingredients for the cake and mix well in a bowl. Mix together wet ingredients and stir into the dry. Pour into a greased 9x9-inch square pan.

  In a separate bowl, mix together topping ingredients. Sprinkle on top of cake.

  Bake for 30 minutes in a preheated 350-degree oven.

  87 Comments

  Hilda12

  Have a great trip, Ginny! Jealous, jealous, jealous!

  Nancyb

  I used to make that little cake for my children after school. Brings back such great memories of autumn afternoons and the smell of cinnamon in the air!

  CrochetPeg

  Have a total blast, sis! I’ll be reading along every day. Love you!

  Pippin987

  Nancy, me, too! I love streusel, even though my WW leader would throw a fit over it. Just can’t imagine making it with Splenda. LOL!

  TinaR

  Ginny, I’m so excited to meet you!!!!!!!!!!! We are going to have a blast.

  Nancy, that’s so sweet that you made those things for your kids. Did you bake every day? Do you still?

  Berniebright

  Have fun!

  READ MORE COMMENTS >>>>

  Chapter 3

  Dead Gulch, Kansas

  The trailer Ginny would be driving to Oregon was the first thing she had purchased with her blog money. For a thousand years, she’d been in love with vintage Airstream trailers, and when her friend Valerie, who had written a wine blog for years, inherited one from her next-door neighbor, Ginny nearly died of envy. She must have given herself away, because the Foodie Four finally urged her to go looking for one.

  It seemed like a fool’s errand, honestly—where would she take it? She’d never gone anywhere and drove only a Taurus, which would not pull a trailer, that was for sure.

  Lavender had asked, Where would you want to drive it?

  And, right away, Ginny thought of Colorado. Only one state over, not even that far away, but she’d always wanted to go, to see the mountains that looked so sharp and cool and pristine in pictures. She imagined herself in her little Airstream, a Bambi maybe, parked beneath a big pine tree, looking at a mountain. A blue mountain with a blue sky over it like a tarp.

  It turned out a lot of people loved retro trailers as much as she did, and she started to connect with them online. At first she was shy about it, saying only that she’d been thinking about getting one and asking what should she look for.

  She had looked online at probably five hundred Airstreams from the fifties and sixties. The ones from the forties, she decided, were a bit too old, while the seventies were too modern. She stuck with her window of time, and even then it was a lot of looking.

  It was Lavender who led Ginny to Coco, the 1964 Bambi that she had known instantly was her trailer. It was not exactly traditional, painted as it was with a garden of cabbage roses along the bottom and all kinds of custom restorations inside. It had belonged to a woman artist, a friend of Lavender’s from their Pan Am days, who had towed it all over the world. The woman’s daughter had lovingly restored everything that didn’t work, such as the toilets and the axles, and anything else that was rotting or in trouble, preserving as much of the art as possible.

  Ginny bought it on the spot, for full price—which, from that day to this, she had never told a soul. No one actually knew how much money she made, so it was hers to spend as she liked. She lied to Matthew and to her family, telling them she’d paid $21,000, and even that infuriated them. Her sister Connie told her she was selfish—that with that much money she could have put a down payment on a house for her daughter or helped out some of their farmer cousins who were hurting in this economy. Her other sister, Peggy, had been thrilled. She still told Ginny they should drive it somewhere, maybe to Las Vegas.

  Matthew didn’t mind, exactly. It was one of the things they’d set up early in their marriage—that they wanted to keep money separated. She didn’t want to be dependent on him. You never knew what might happen. Even in their small town, people fell in love with other people who were not their spouses, and some poor woman was always getting divorced and struggling to make ends meet.

  Nope. That would never be Ginny. She starte
d work at the supermarket only six weeks after Christie was born—another thing that got her in trouble with Connie, working when her baby was so young—and moved up into the bakery by the time Christie was three.

  When Ginny brought the Airstream home from the show in Kansas City where she’d picked it up, Matthew told her that he wasn’t going to be camping in it. He didn’t like camping, fishing, hunting. None of that stuff. He liked his creature comforts, his meals without dirt, his breakfast served on china, not paper. That suited her fine. She didn’t actually want him in it, although she was wise enough to keep that to herself.

  Ginny honestly had not cared one bit what anybody thought of her trailer. She loved it and spent the whole winter making it her own in little ways—with linens and Fiesta ware and photos she’d shot specifically to put up on the walls.

  Now, on this mid-June Saturday evening, she carried a load of supplies from the house into the trailer. Paper towels and matches; tea and coffee and powdered creamer; a box of sugar cubes, which wouldn’t be as messy as regular; mustard and mayo and salt. In her imagination, she poured coffee into a turquoise Fiesta ware mug and stirred in some creamer, then carried it to the door and stepped out into nature.

  “There you are!”

  The voice of Ginny’s mother startled her out of her pleasant reverie. “Hi,” she said.

  Ula hauled herself up the steps. She wasn’t stout, but her fitness could never be called anything but piss-poor. Standing just inside the door, as if tigers might be caged within, she said, “Colorful, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one of the reasons I liked it.”

  “Looks like a Victorian whorehouse to me, but I guess we all have our different ideas of what’s pretty.”

  Ginny squinted, but even blurring everything immensely, she couldn’t get whorehouse. “More Art Nouveau than Victorian, I’d say.”

  “Whatever. Why do you always have to do that, make me feel stupid?”

  “I didn’t mean to.” Or maybe, in some small, mean way, she had. “Sorry.”

  “You knew what I meant.”

  Ginny nodded. That it was a whorehouse. A house for a whore. A waft of tomorrow moved across her throat, a promise of cool air blowing from the open road.

  Ula dug in her purse and brought out a small package. “I brought you a present.”

  Surprised and touched, Ginny opened it to find a whistle. “You can blow that if somebody tries to rape you,” Ula said. “Which you might think wouldn’t happen at your age, but it’s not just young pretty women who get raped, you know.”

  “I know. Thank you.” She hung the whistle on a hook by the sink. “I am bringing Willow with me, you know.” Willow was her dog, a mixed-breed border collie–shepherd–Newfoundland, who was smarter than most people and had a reassuringly deep and ferocious warning bark. She was mostly black, with gold ears and a white patch on her chest, and she had the broad nose of a Newfie and the pert beautiful ears of a shepherd. The brains were all border collie.

  “How are you going to carry a dog?”

  “She’ll ride in the car with me, Mama,” Ginny said mildly. “Do you want to come in and have a cup of coffee or something?”

  “No, no. I have to get to the market. When are you leaving?”

  “Bright and early tomorrow morning.”

  Ula stepped forward and gave Ginny a hug. “You know I think you’re crazy, but you stay safe, now, and check in regular, all right?”

  Ginny smelled Johnson’s baby powder and Suave hair spray as she hugged her mother, a smell that seemed much too old for a woman in her sixties. “I will,” she said. As she straightened, she said, “You can follow my blog, you know. I’ll be posting every day.”

  Ula nodded. “I’ll try to remember,” she said, as if it was some crazy-hard task, and lumbered down the steps.

  FROM: Ginny@cakeofdreams.com

  TO: FoodieFour@yahoogroups.com

  SUBJECT: Surprise!

  Hey, girls. Remember how I thought that no one cared if I was leaving? Hahahaha. I was so wrong. They gave me a surprise going-away party. Only it wasn’t a surprise, because Matthew told me before we left home (it was pretty mean to spoil Peggy and Christie’s surprise like that, but he did it to hurt me, not them. I guess he’s not as happy about me taking this trip as he has been saying). I pretended that I didn’t know anyway, because the two of them went to so much trouble to plan it—Peggy did most of the legwork, but I guess they were on the phone every day. Christie came in from Chicago just for the night, and you could tell that it was her brainchild from all the special little touches and good taste. Which makes it sound like my mom and sisters don’t have good taste, and that’s not true. My mom had a cake made to look like an Airstream, from one of my blog posts (and here I thought she’d never even read it!), and Peggy, my younger sister, specially ordered a messenger bag she thought I’d like to sling over my shoulder.

  I felt scared and sad in that room, I have to tell you. All the people who love me and I’ve known all my life—just about everybody came. My cousins and aunts and uncles and my snotty brother-in-law and all of our friends, and I was getting all emotional, thinking about leaving them all behind. I’ve never done anything like this in my life, and it’s like some wild thing has taken hold of me, flinging me forward almost without me thinking. I feel homesick for everybody and I haven’t even left yet! Christie told me that was normal. She said it happened when she went to college, then when she headed to Georgetown for med school, then again when she left for Chicago.

  She made me a travel playlist for my iPod. Now I guess I need to get myself going. I can’t believe I’m finally going to meet you guys. Wish you could be there, Val!!!!!

  Ginny

  FROM: Valerie@winedancer.com

  TO: FoodieFour@yahoogroups.com

  SUBJECT: re: Surprise!

  I am so proud of you, Gin!! Wish I could be there, too.

  xoxoxoxox V

  FROM: Ruby@flavorofabluemoon.com

  TO: FoodieFour@yahoogroups.com

  SUBJECT: re: Surprise!

  Whenever I am going to leave one place for another, it is as if every corner and light switch and scent of the old place suddenly becomes unbearably unique and precious beyond measure. And of course they are. Every moment of our lives is precious and unique beyond measure.

  But there is a point when the homesickness gives way to anticipation, or sometimes I feel them both, swirling together. Sometimes I think what I feel is about what I label it. So, tomorrow morning when you get that blast of dry mouth and butterflies, tell yourself it isn’t fear—it is anticipation.

  Love,

  Ruby

  FROM: Lavender@lavenderhoneyblog.com

  TO: FoodieFour@yahoogroups.com

  SUBJECT: re: Surprise!

  You get your bottom here, missy, hell or high water. You bought that trailer to go have an adventure, and you’re going to have one.

  Chapter 4

  In the soft purple time before dawn, Ginny and her dog, Willow, padded silently back and forth between the trailer and the Jeep she’d finally bought. They loaded up the last of their things, Willow’s soft dog bed for the cargo area, Ginny’s sweater, and a pile of snacks and treats and the spare leash for potty breaks.

  It had been a fitful night. Ginny had awakened at 11:45 and 1:32 and 3:10. Finally, when she woke up again at 4:02, wondering what in the world she was doing, she slid as silently as possible out of bed and went downstairs to start the coffeepot. While it brewed, she fired up the laptop she was taking with her, the private machine she didn’t share with anybody. She dashed off an email to the Foodie Four, knowing that no one would see it until later. She was a notoriously early riser, and only Valerie was in a time zone behind her, in Ohio.

  In the quiet darkness, she sipped her coffee and read the comments on her blog. This morning there were already eighty-nine comments, all wishing her luck, some extending more invitations, some offering tidbits of advice, like a good roadside café in F
risco on her way through the Rocky Mountains.

  The comments made her feel better. She had accepted the invitations of two different backbloggers in different places along the road. The knowledge that they were out there, waiting, friendly, made it easier.

  In some ways, the community she’d discovered in the blog was more real to her than her own family. They were certainly a lot more encouraging.

  She posted a cheery response: Getting dressed now! Can’t wait! Then she headed upstairs, Willow trailing behind.

  Her traveling clothes were laid out in the spare bedroom, clean and pressed and ready to go: a pair of khaki capris with plenty of pockets—Lavender had pointed her to a hiking website for quick-dry travel clothes—a simple red sleeveless blouse that made her eyes look much bluer, and, her old standby, tennis shoes with ankle socks. Willow lay in the doorway, paws neatly stretched out in front of her, and her tongue lolled out in an easy pant. She watched Ginny with her bright gold eyes, curious and alert, knowing that something was up and she was a part of it.

  Ginny knelt and kissed the dog’s nose. “I’m so glad we met,” she whispered, mindful of Matthew sleeping in the other room. He had not been thrilled with the puppy Ginny brought home from Walmart four years ago. A rescue group had been trying to find homes for the animals, and Ginny had spied Willow sitting in tidy puppy sweetness near the back, her ears up. When Ginny asked to see her, the girl hesitated. “I was thinking of keeping her.”

  “Oh,” Ginny said, weirdly embarrassed. “I’m sorry! I thought they were all for adoption.”

  A woman turned and gave the girl a hard look. “They are, honey, don’t you worry.” She picked up the pup and placed her squarely in Ginny’s arms. Willow sighed against Ginny’s chest, and her fur was as soft and thick as a bear pelt. Ginny bent her nose into the puppy’s fur and smelled sunshine and grass. She was lost.