True Story

On the Monday before school started, I'd signed up to bring half of a dinner to a family in our ward.  Someone would bring the main dish and I was in charge of dessert and a salad.  I got everything ready and brought it over at dinnertime, only to find a note on the door saying that the dinner was no longer needed.  I gave the dessert to the family's neighbors, who were chatting outside, and wasn't sure what to do with the salad.  It was big enough for a few people, and nobody in my family would eat it (other than me) and the contents were such that it wouldn't keep in the fridge.  I called a friend in my neighborhood to see if she would like it and she politely declined, but said that her neighbor, Sis. B., loves salads and might appreciate some.  I had another friend, Pat, who agreed to take some, so I divided the salad into two portions: one in a container with a lid, and one in a disposable bowl with a layer of cellophane over it.

Pat needed Cat's help with something, so I sent Cat to Pat's house with the salad in the closed container.  And then I made a critical error.  I sent Jack and Eliza to Sis. B's house with the salad in the bowl with the cellophane over it.  I decided to save them a little time by sending them out the back door to this neighbor's house.  Jack and Eliza seemed to be taking longer than I thought they should, but after a little while, I saw them climbing on the gate to get to our back yard.  I went outside and reminded them not to climb on the gate, and Jack excitedly told me about the candy that Sis. B. had given them when they delivered the salad.  Then he told me that he'd dropped the salad on the way over.

"What? You did?  Where did you drop it?  Did any come out?  How much?  What did you do?"

Well, it took some time but I finally found out what happened.  Apparently, the gate to get out of our back yard wouldn't open for them when they were leaving, so they decided to climb over the gate. (I'm not sure what I was doing that I didn't know about this.)  Jack dropped the salad when he was climbing over, but it landed the right way in the grass and no harm was done.  Then he finished climbing and landed on the salad bowl, sending the cellophane, and the salad, everywhere.  But they just picked up as much as they could, put it back in the bowl, and delivered it.

Aghhh!  What?!?!?

I thought that maybe I should do something about this but didn't know what to do.  By now it had been several minutes and, for all I knew, Sis. B. had already eaten the salad.  What would I do, call and ask her if she found any bugs?  I knew the chances were pretty good that there was nothing wrong with the salad, and that if she saw anything suspicious she would probably discard the whole thing.  So I explained to the kids what they should do if something like this happened in the future, and just moved on with my evening.

But it kept bothering me.  What if something was wrong?  What if this 93-year-old widow got sick from a rare grass-born illness?

I needed an excuse to go talk to her, and it came to me the next day.  I had a few zucchinis that neighbors had given me and knew we wouldn't eat all of them.  I chose one to bring to Sis. B., and walked over with the younger kids so that we could share the zucchini.  As soon as she saw me she said, "Oh, thank you so much for that delicious salad!  My daughter and I ate it all!" Huge sigh of relief.  I made a joke (kind of) about how glad I was that it was okay, because sometimes you don't know how things will be when a kid is sent to deliver them.  And that was that.

By the way, Cat delivered the salad to Pat and helped her with the task at her house and didn't have any heart-stopping stories for me.  Being reliable can be so uninteresting.