“Well,” Delia said, “it’s a lot. And jars and jars and jars of preserves. And cans and cans and cans. . . .”
The others took it up. Why we should have boasted of the quantity of fruit in our parents’ cellars, I have no notion, save that it was for the unidentified reason which impels all boasting. When I am in a very new bit of country, where generalizations and multiplications follow every fact, I am sometimes reminded of the fashion of our talk whose statements tried to exceed themselves, in a kind of pyrotechnic pattern bursting at last into nothing and the night. We might have been praising climate or crops or real estate. Mary Elizabeth spoke with something like eagerness.
“We got a bottle of blackberry cordial my grandmother made before she died,” she said. “We keep it in the top bureau drawer.”
“What a funny place to keep it . . .” Delia began, and stopped of her own accord.
I remember that everybody was willing enough to let Mary Elizabeth help pick up the dishes. Then she took a tree for Pussy-wants-a-corner, which always follows the picnic
