The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

“Well, you know the old saying,” Aunt Hetty replied. “If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.” In a practical tone, she added, “We’ll all just have to pitch in and help those who can’t help themselves.”


Verna chuckled. “My daddy always said, ‘If you buy a rainbow, don’t pay cash for it.’”

“Well, I don’t know how we can help,” Earlynne protested. “Short of standing on the street corner with an umbrella, handing out dollars while the rain pours down.”

“Even if we had dollars to spare, that wouldn’t work,” Bessie said, ignoring Verna. “Folks are proud. They don’t like to admit they need help.”

Bessie looked troubled, and Lizzy knew why. Two of the genteel elderly ladies who rented rooms at Bessie’s Magnolia Manor were behind on their rent. Bessie would never turn them out on the street, of course—that meant they’d have to go to the county poor farm, which would be a tragedy. But she was always strapped for cash to keep Magnolia Manor afloat. And this bank “holiday” would only make matters worse.

“I’m sure we’ll think of something,” Aunt Hetty said. She glanced at the clock over the icebox. “Eight minutes. Time’s up, Verna.”

Verna shut off the burner under the canner. “Want me to take it off the stove?”

“Yes, please,” Aunt Hetty replied. “We’ll let the pressure go down by itself before we open it and take the jars out.”

When it came to canning and preserving, Aunt Hetty, at eighty, was the most experienced of all the Dahlias. For years, she had canned fruits and vegetables using Ball jars with zinc lids and rubber gaskets or the Atlas E-Z Seal jars, which had a wire bail that clamped tight on the domed glass lid and flipped off for easy opening. And until a few years ago, she had always used the tried-and-true boiling-water-bath method, where you put a rack of jars—pints or quarts or even half gallons, if that’s what you had—into a big canning kettle. Then you poured a couple of teakettles of hot water over them and let the whole thing boil on the stove, ten to twenty minutes for fruits and up to an hour and fifteen minutes for tomatoes. But that was safe only if the food had plenty of acid in it. If you had extra green beans, for instance (which had no acid at all), it was better to pickle them than risk killing everybody in your family with botulism.

But Aunt Hetty always prided herself on keeping up to date, so she was the first in town to buy a canner and adopt the newfangled Mason jar lids. They came in two parts, the metal lid with a permanent rubber gasket and the shiny metal ring that fastened the lid down tight until it was sealed and you could take the ring off. But she never did. She always said it seemed safer to leave the ring on. Anyway, the rings and lids were cheap, just twenty-four cents a dozen, which was cheaper and a lot more reliable than the old zinc lids and rubber gaskets.

“I blame Mr. Johnson for this mess,” Earlynne remarked, as Verna picked up a pair of hot pads and took the canner off the stove, setting it on a trivet on the linoleum-topped counter. “If he hadn’t stolen that money—”

“Now, hold your horses, Earlynne,” Aunt Hetty said briskly. “We don’t know for a fact that Mr. Johnson stole anything. For all we know, it might be just somebody’s silly little mistake. At the bank, I mean. The money might be there, but they just can’t find it. Shouldn’t blame the cow when the milk goes sour, you know.”

Bessie’s gray curls bobbed over her ears. “I swear, Aunt Hetty,” she harrumphed, “you never could hold a mean thought in your head for longer than a second. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Those bank examiners wouldn’t have closed the bank unless they saw a few sparks.” She wrung out the dishrag and hung it over the edge of the sink. “Liz, I heard that Mr. Johnson hired Mr. Moseley as his lawyer. Is he going to stay out of jail?”