Once every three years, the Animas Valley Garden Club hosts the spring meeting for the area’s three garden clubs. This was our year. The day before, we gathered at the grange and set up the tables and chairs. The tables, homemade with folding legs, had been made by Ruth’s grandfather.
The menu was soup, salad, and desserts, and we all cooked the night before. (I made cheesecake and 3 salad dressings.)
That morning we decorated the tables.
Each person got a little coleus plant grown in Jennifer’s greenhouse. Ruth and I wrapped each coleus in waxed paper, and tied raffia around it. There’s a poem about gardening in pink paper, and a lavender agenda. The baskets of flowers are borrowed from Kelly’s store; the tablecloths are borrowed from a grange member who has a full set of tablecloths for all the grange tables.
Miss Roberta particularly enjoyed the desserts. She said that she wasn’t used to not doing it herself, but she certainly thought we did a fine job. She said, I thought the club acquitted itself very well.
A few years ago, my then 92-year-old neighbor asked if I would join her garden club. Since it met once a month and she was getting to an age where she needed help with transportation, I said I would. Two years later, I’m the club secretary and Miss Roberta, who has been attending Garden Club meetings for over 50 years, is still going strong.
Most of the meetings take place in the Grange, and there are three or four women in the garden club who have been Grange members their whole life.
The Grange is a place of rural pride, home to the 4-H Club and the Saint Patrick’s Day corned beef boiled dinner.
It is part of the National Grange system of 3,600 Granges in 37 states, with an American flag out front.
Roberta and her late husband Robert are both Past Masters of the Grange, with their picture on the wall.
This is the Garden Club. Many of the members have been attending meetings for decades. Ruth was the hostess today, and she brought cherry pie made with her own cherries from the deep freeze.
It was an exceptional pie. And Roberta looked like a flower
but was pretty annoyed because she couldn’t hear at the meeting. She was the principal of two schools in her prime. Just last year she ran a bear off her property by yelling at him. She is a small woman with a tiny jaw, but it was very firmly set at that garden club meeting.
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