Author discovers that it’s never too late to make things right, no matter how trivial the transgression might have been
On warm Sunday afternoons, a crowd of relatives often gathered for a potluck picnic in the shady front yard of our farm. My aunts arrived cradling casserole dishes between padded oven mitts. Others toted large cake pans covered with checkered tea towels.
As a four-year-old, I could hardly wait to see what sort of desserts lay in store, but I had been taught it was not polite to snoop, much less ask questions.
I watched the men make picnic tables by putting planks across sawhorses set up under the shade of the sprawling old elm. Aunts and uncles and older cousins gathered around as the roast chicken and baked ham and casseroles were brought from the kitchen.
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My mother was too preoccupied to notice that I barely nibbled at my potato salad and ham. I was leaving room for those desserts that still sat on the counter in the back kitchen. What lay under those checkered tea towels? Molasses cookies? Chocolate cake? Date squares?
While the adults were busily engaged in conversation and second helpings, I snuck inside to take a look. I saw butter tarts and raisin cookies and lemon squares and apple pies, but one cake in particular caught my attention.
I was already wise to what happens when certain cakes fall slightly in the middle. I had watched my distraught mother try to level out the evidence with icing. The cake under Aunt Dorothy’s tea towel had a slightly concave surface, and I just knew the fudge icing would be thickest in the centre.
I peeked outside. Everyone was lingering over the main course. Would they never get to the desserts?
I could wait no longer. Taking a table knife from the cutlery drawer, I pulled up a chair and cut a piece of cake for myself, a nice big piece right from the centre, where the brown sugar icing was thickest. Then I snuck upstairs to eat it.
I had no sooner finished the last bite when my mother and Aunt Dorothy came into the kitchen to get the desserts. I held my breath as I listened from the top of the stairway.
After what seemed like a very long time, Aunt Dorothy must have lifted the tea towel from her cake and then exclaimed, “well, well, Rose, there’s a mouse in your house — just look at this!”
Fully expecting a sharp reprimand, I waited, and waited.
For some reason, the women were far more concerned about cutting pies. When the screen door banged shut behind them, I knew I was safe — safe but too embarrassed to show my face for the rest of the day.
That night when I said my prayers, I pleaded with God to forgive me for stealing the piece of cake but I could never forget it. The niggling guilt played on my conscience for 50 years, at which time I was overseeing the desserts at a family reunion. I decided to select a certain piece of cake just for Aunt Dorothy.
“But my dear, you didn’t have to bring me the piece with the most icing,” she protested.
“That’s to make up for the piece I stole 50 years ago,” I told her. “Can you forgive me?”
“Forgive you? I can’t even remember it. Sit right down and tell me all about it.”
Her brown eyes twinkled with amusement.
“I never did bake the lightest cakes, but that piece must have been especially heavy if it weighed on your conscience all these years. I’m sure I forgave you the day it happened.”
She chuckled as she hugged me.
That is how I learned there is something about forgiveness that is even sweeter than a piece of cake with thick brown sugar icing.
