Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame

by Olivia Ford

When life felt overwhelming, baking was as simple as eggs, sugar, butter, and flour.

It was the strongest connection to the past and the recipes were at the heart of some of her most cherished memories.

He had a wonderful way with children in that he spoke to them as if they were his peers. He never put on the patronizing voice of feigned enthusiasm or commented on their appearance, but instead listened to them with the same integrity he would give to any adult.

For a moment the future wasn’t somewhere that she feared, a place promising only old age and loss, but instead a place of hope and possibility. It became somewhere she wanted to tread.

Nothing edible should ever be blue.

To want something, she realized, was to make yourself vulnerable to losing it.

she wished she had never started keeping a second secret. Living with the first was enough.

Life could take away opportunities, but never your imagination.

Although they were no older than five or six, it struck her that they were little time capsules of all those who came before them, mirrors of their ancestors who had lived through wars and fallen in love and, by a stroke of luck, survived. That red hair, an aptitude for math, was in fact an age-old gift from someone that they had never met, but without whom they would not exist.

“What you need to remember, Bernard Quinn, is that what some people call ‘a healthy appetite for life,’ others call ‘losing the plot,’ ”

“and we’ll only be grieving for something which has been our greatest joy.”

For as long as she had known him, he had been a man of routine. Life without him would feel as if the clocks had stopped.

Never had the bottom of a cake mattered quite so much.

she felt the embers of connection, of having lifted someone else’s spirits.

She had once read somewhere that the tragedy of monogamy was that you never fell in love again, but how wrong it was. Over the years, she had fallen in love with Bernard over and over and over.

We are, after all, just a sum total of all of our experiences, walking around in a pair of shoes . . .”

“I’m no expert and I certainly haven’t done everything right over the years, but the strongest couples I know have grown together, supporting their partner’s changes rather than harnessing or fearing them. It’s a bit like growing roses—you don’t get to choose exactly which way the stems unfurl, but if you help them climb you get the pleasure of watching them flourish.”

“We could all live in fear of the worst-case scenario, but it wouldn’t be a lot of fun . . .” She fell silent, searching for a way around his words. “Try to be led by hope, rather than fear,”

“Not only that, but if you’re fulfilled in yourself, I think often you can be a better person to those around you.”

As she slid them into the oven she pulled up a chair next to it, meeting the face of her dark reflection in the oven door: her silver hair, her tired eyes, the lines in her skin which had formed from laughter, from tears, from living.

Old age can make us feel like we need to live a smaller life, but Jenny has shown that our dreams have a place at every stage of our journey . . . that they can be achieved because of our age, and not in spite of it.”

“Recipes are very precious things. They contain little pieces of history, of nostalgia, and of people—exactly as they were at the time when they wrote them. In reading their words and following their methods, they were by my side. I thought I was alone when I headed into the barn, but I never really was.”

keep writing them down, keep making them, and keep passing them on.”

“I just want you to know that you have my full support in finding him, if that’s what you want to do.”

that while she had spent sixty happy years with Bernard, it was only now that she was content within herself.

“Someone’s dusted off number eleven for us, the light’s on and the gate’s open.” It was the smallest things, she thought, that meant the universe.