I am old, and most of the people who could take away my blue ribbon are long dead and gone. My own mother passed away over ten years ago, so she can’t confirm nor deny her complicity. This is a true story, as I remember it, but keep in mind, all this happened about fifty-five years ago, and I can’t remember what I ate for lunch yesterday.

Not all of my siblings were in 4-H clubs. It must have been Mary Martinsen and her daughter Susan’s influence that got my sister Marion involved in the Merry Maidens 4-H club. The Martinsen’s had a daughter, Patty who was one of my earliest and best friends. Mike Martinsen and my brother Robert’s hung out, and the club name was updated to Merry Maidens & Masters 4-H club. When Patty Martinsen joined 4-H, I was still too young, but they let me go to meetings as a tag-a-long.

The Martinsen’s lived in town. Mrs. Martinsen was the PhysEd teacher, and Mr. Martinsen was the elementary school principal. We were farmers. Growing up, we had everything the Martinsen girls wanted–horses, a house out of town on a farm. In 4-H Marion led the way as the oldest sibling. She entered sheep in the fair. Marion was smart and competitive. She worked with my dad and between the two of them they figured out how to show off the flock.

Robert and I followed in her footsteps, and my dad backed us with his support and his money which he invested in the herd. We had one of the best Suffolk sheep flocks in the state. Dad bought rams from Oskaloosa, Iowa and Moscow, Idaho, and who knows where else. We took our sheep to county and state fairs competing, and ram sales in Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota. I have a box full of trophies and ribbons from those days. The sheep belonged to the farm, but each year we would pick our rams and ewes that we would show at the fairs. Many times we three would be competing against each other for the awards.

I much preferred working with the livestock than doing domestic chores. I didn’t mind the barnyard smells, dirt, manure, feeding and herding. It also involved more people. During shearing, the crew would come and the whole family would get involved. I was the youngest so they would put me in the wool bag–a ten foot long, thirty six inch round burlap bag that we had built a tall iron frame the bags would hook to. They would drop me into the bag and throw bundles of newly shorn wool into the bag onto my head. My job was to stomp the wool down and pack it so we could get more bundles of wool into the bags. In addition to the lanolin, dirt and itchy wool fibers, I’d end up with ticks latched onto me in the creepiest places.

But, because I was a girl, I also had to take cooking and sewing in 4-H. My first sewing project was a square scarf. I had to fringe the edges. It was literally a square piece of cloth that I had to sew around the edges and pull thread out to make the fringe. My mom was a stickler for straight seams, and I spent a lot of time tearing out seams and having to redo them, straighter. I ended up liking sewing. Maybe it was the mechanics of it–I can’t tell you how many sleeves I sewed in inside-out. I got pretty good at sewing, for an amateur.

Which leads me to cooking. Back then, everyone made a banana bread. So did I. The cooking and sewing projects had to be handed in during what was called Contest Days. It wasn’t the same time as the fair. Ladies would look at our entries and judge our work. That was why straight seams were so important. Mom would hover over me while I crankily sat at her Pfaff sewing machine. The blue ribbon was as much for her as for me. She was Martha Stewart before Martha Stewart.

So that fateful day when I was supposed to make a cherry pie and enter it into the Big Horn County 4-H Contest Days, I was outside, avoiding housework. Mom finally tracked me down, and we set about making a cherry pie.

It soon became evident that I had no clue how to make a, pie, cherry or otherwise. I had never made a pie in my life. The clock was ticking, I was running out of time. I had no idea you had to make a crust (from scratch) and pie filling and more crust.

Pretty soon, mom was running the mixer, adding the ingredients, talking me through the steps. Granted, I stayed in the kitchen and kind of hovered beside my mom, but in all truthfulness the pie was my mom’s. She made the cherries into the gooey delectable filling, and cut the top crust into strips that she wove into an amazing lattice. I did pinch the crust edges into a wavy pattern, all by myself.

OK, I confess. I took the pie into town and put my name on it. It went through the judging process. I should have taken a picture. It was a work of art. But it wasn’t the only pie at the contest. The girls my age had entered their pies. But it was clear to me which girls had made their own pies. They were… cute. messy. crooked. burnt.

One of my best friends was Cathy Miller. She lived on Sarpy Creek, about 20 miles from town. Her mom was Edna Mae, and her dad was Ed. Ed had been a classmate of my dad in high school. I would stay overnight with Cathy and we’d ride horses into the sand rocks across the road from their home.

Cathy had entered a chokecherry pie from berries she had picked on the ranch. It had a perfectly browned crust with little chunks of sugar on top, toasted just right. Seriously, she hand-picked the chokecherries. My cherries probably came out of a can.

The judges declared Cathy and I had the best pies at the contest that year! I collected that blue ribbon for my mom but never said a word.

Much of my self esteem came from competing with the sheep all over the state and winning awards. I won a lot of awards in sewing, and I can honestly say as I grew older, my sewing projects were my own.

But I couldn’t have done ANY of it without my parents’ support. Whether it was kicking me out of bed to feed the sheep or making me stir the cherries as she added the ingredients, it was their encouragement and support that propped me up.

Years later Cathy opened a shop downtown, and I would go visit her every time I was in town. Cathy and her older brother and sister all travelled the world. I often wondered if their wanderlust was because they lived so far out of town. I can’t remember if I ever told her about my mom’s pie. Cathy died of pancreatic cancer way, way too early. Her pie really was the best.

And I never made another cherry pie in my life.