[Primrose Bolger]

Ginger rubbed her eyes sleepily as cook took the last pan of iced sugar buns from her and put them on the sideboard to be scooped out onto platters and passed round for second breakfast along with wedges of apple and creamy yellow cheese. ‘You’ve done a good job here, lass. Now take this mug of tea and a bun for yourself and go out to the garden for the rest of the morning.’ Ginger yawned widely, having gotten up early to help with the baking, and shook her head ‘yes’ at the directions.

A mug of tea sweetened with honey and lightened with cream and two buns bursting with fat raisins accompanied her out the back door. She could not help but hear the sound of a familiar voice as she stepped out onto the little landing. Ferdy, it was! Just as Cook had promised. She crossed her first two fingers as best she could between the handle of the mug and the mug itself, and screwed her eyes shut tight for a moment, making a quick wish that all would go well. A loud Ahem from Cook urged her off the landing and through the dusty back yard toward the garden.

An upturned bushel basket served for a seat as she sat down to have her snack before starting work. The bees she noted as she surveyed the garden were already hard at work. They poked their furry little noses deep into the flowering vines and bushes, dragging their fat, yellowed legs from blossom to blossom as drank deep of the nectar. And they hummed all the while, making her smile as she wondered if it were some sort of happy song they’d all learned together as children. Humming herself, her drink finished and the major part of both buns, she licked her fingers clean of the sticky frosting and went to see about the potato mound at the north end of the plot. Cook had been very particular about her heaping up the mounds of straw just so, for the taters to grow in and be plucked out easily. And after that would come the weeding and spading of the little herb plants, followed by the never-ending picking of the beans. And then lunch! Her mind working over the possibilities for that meal, Ginger began taking up great handfuls of straw from the nearby pile to work in about the tater plants.

Her cup and the morsel of bun she’d left by the basket were being worked over themselves. The ants had made a quick march to lap up the sweet sticky fluid in the bottom of the mug, with some of the more enterprising and stronger carrying off bits of the bun back home . . .