Every Bag of Cranberries
The cranberries came into the store on Tuesday. I knew before I reached the produce aisle. There was a low pile of red bags near the apples. A woman in a green coat already had two.
I took six.
This is not a decision I make in the moment. It is a decision I made years ago, and I carry it out every autumn. Fresh cranberries show up for a few weeks. Then they go, and the shelves fill with the canned kind that keep the shape of the can.
So I buy as many as I can carry. The bags go straight into the freezer, unopened. Cranberries do not mind the cold. They keep for a year, and they bake up from frozen as if nothing happened.
By the first week of November the bottom drawer looks like a jewelry box. Sorrel inspects it every time I open the door. She has no interest in cranberries. She is checking that I have not left the chicken out.
Here is what I do with them over the winter. Cranberry sauce, of course, but that is the least of it. They go into muffins and into the batter of a plain yellow cake. They go into a pot of rice with a little orange peel. I put them in the stuffing. I put them in oatmeal on cold mornings, with a spoonful of brown sugar sinking in.
They are sharp. That is the whole point of them. A sweet thing wants a sharp thing beside it, the way a long evening wants a short walk first.
The woman in the green coat nodded at my cart on the way to the register. Six bags. She looked at her own two. Then she turned around and went back for more.
That was a good day at the store.
By Ember Penrose. Writer of slow stories and warm worlds. No dragons required. · Author of The Elves of Nine Ashes, a cozy fantasy series set in the Aldenmere. Meet Ember.
