Pam Robinson’s entry into the fall 2011 Writing It Real contest is an essay about her memories of her mother’s cooking and life on a farm. As I spend time harvesting onions, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, various beans, Asian pears and soon apples and second crop radishes from my own garden, I resonate with the harvest time trigger for Pam’s contest entry in 2011. So, I am reposting Pam’s initial entry with my inserted notes to her bolded in the text. Pam’s revised entry and our 2011 guest contest judge’s complimentary words follow. Important note:  I will announce the 2018 fall contest guidelines and submission deadline in the weekly newsletter. Many writers believe that writing is largely in revision. Here is one example of how having the responses of a trusted first reader helps you listen to the words in your draft and bring your writing forward. I hope you will enter our contest and receive my responses to your first drafts and then re-enter a revision (at no extra fee) for the chosen guest judge to consider.

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First Draft of “Table of Plenty” Submitted by Pam Robinson with Notes for Revision

With the coming of harvest, my memory takes me back to my ole Kentucky home and scenes of a lost world. During their burley tobacco harvest, my parents, sharecroppers themselves, paid for half the labor to cut the tall, leafy stalks and hang them in the barn. After clearing the breakfast dishes, my mother Estelle (pronounced Es – till) rushed from helping to milk the dairy herd and spent the rest of the morning cooking for the field hands. She cooked dozens of [I picture hundreds, not dozens, if she did this for years] these meals in her lifetime, and I remember the particulars of the table she laid, crowded with enough food to put Cracker Barrel to shame.

She would surround the entrée, beef roast or fried chicken, with potatoes (mashed or cooked in butter), skillet-fried sweet corn, green beans or black-eyed peas, deviled eggs, some boiled cabbage or steamed carrots, and her signature biscuits, the perfect circles rounded not by a cookie cutter but by her hands. The men would wash it down with water, Kool-Aid, or milk from our Grade A dairy farm. Surprisingly, Mama hated sweet tea, so she never served it. While they were eating, the men kept one eye on the kitchen counter. Mama set the dessert there that she’d prepared the evening before — usually blackberry cobbler or fried apple pies, but sometimes coconut crème or chocolate meringue pies.

Almost the entire meal came from our farm, from the fat calf to the plump chicken, and all had received the magic touch of my mother’s hands. She fed the calves and the chickens, helped to milk the cows and cleaned the dairy, gathered the eggs, planted and tilled and harvested and stored the vegetables, and picked and put up her own blackberries and apples. She considered it a weakness to use store-bought butter instead of churning it as she learned in her youth, but the grocer could offer it cheaper than she could make it.

Mama set a plate for me before the field hands came in. She knew, and I saw, how greedily they reached across the table for the best pieces of chicken and for second helpings. She also remembered how the grownups in her childhood sat at the table first, and she was determined to change that tradition. Mama spent little time fussing over hugs and kisses or terms of endearment, but she knew the meaning of sacrificial love.

I loved Mama’s cooking, and no food has ever really tasted any better to me. She herself waited to eat what few leftovers remained. Her appetite had paled during the morning’s race to complete her cooking. She [I find myself wondering how she did all that work without eating enough calories] had provided her best, and she had seen it consumed within a matter of minutes. No wonder TV dinners or Long John Silver’s seemed a luxury to her in retirement. After all, she knew food tastes best when someone else cooks it. [It is hard for me to think she’d like corporate preparations after being such a down home and good cook. Perhaps some more detail about how she looked as she ate this would help or some information about her attending dinners at your house and enjoying being cooked for. Somehow this ending because of the corporate names leaves me feeling badly and like the speaker’s mother abandoned her own standards because she may have had to not because she appreciated the taste of these meals.]

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From the first draft I saw of this essay, I enjoyed the speaker’s view of things — how much her mother did, how good it was for all those she fed, the animals and humans alike. I felt satisfied “listening in” on the speaker realizing why her mother fed her before she fed the farm hands, and I engaged with the way the girl noticed that since her mom didn’t like sweet tea, she didn’t serve it at all. In addition to connecting with the essay, I also had questions that I hoped the author would address in her revision.

I wrote Pam that I thought the place to work further on this essay was at the end. I hoped the comments I put in would help Pam steer her essay in a satisfying direction — it was as if the naming of food chains at the end diluted the power of the mother’s sacrifices and skills. The ending as I read it made the essay seem like it had been an investigation into why the speaker’s mom would eat that chain food in her retirement and think it good because it was cooked by someone else when there are so many other ways to be cooked for and well by someone else — her daughter, a local restaurant, church suppers.

I wanted to know if the daughter understands her mother’s pleasure in the chain food, how it was cooked and presented and the quantities put on a plate. Maybe there were more reasons than just that it was cooked by someone else that came into play in her mother’s older years, given the mother’s background as a migrant working (or renter of a farm, I’m not quite sure which). I would like to know if the mom still nurtured — plants, pets, grandchildren — in her retirement but turned to this one guilty pleasure for herself; I think the speaker in the essay may have a more complex thought to reveal about her mother’s like of chain restaurant food than the one she initially wrote into the essay.

I hoped the idea of extending the ending would help Pam get going on a revision. I found the essay endearing and almost there — I wanted the ending to feel like a door clicked shut, not like a surprise.

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Here’s the revision that Pam sent in:

Table of Plenty By Pam Robinson

At harvest each year, my memory takes me back to my ole Kentucky home and scenes of a lost world. During their burley tobacco harvest, my parents, sharecroppers themselves, paid for half the labor to cut the tall, leafy stalks and hang them in the barn. After clearing the breakfast dishes, my mother Estelle (pronounced Es – till) rushed from helping to milk the dairy herd and spent the rest of the morning cooking for the field hands. She cooked dozens of these meals in her lifetime, and I remember the particulars of the table she laid, crowded with enough food to put Cracker Barrel to shame.

She would surround the entrée, beef roast or fried chicken, with potatoes (mashed or cooked in butter), skillet-fried sweet corn, green beans or black-eyed peas, deviled eggs, some boiled cabbage or steamed carrots, and her signature biscuits, the perfect circles rounded not by a cookie cutter but by her hands. The men would wash it down with water, Kool-Aid, or milk from our Grade A dairy farm. Surprisingly, Mama hated sweet tea, so she never served it. While they were eating, the men kept one eye on the kitchen counter. Mama set the dessert there that she’d prepared the evening before — usually blackberry cobbler or fried apple pies, but sometimes coconut crème or chocolate meringue pies.

Almost the entire meal came from our farm, from the fat calf to the plump chicken, and all had received the magic touch of my mother’s hands. She fed the calves and the chickens, helped to milk the cows and cleaned the dairy, gathered the eggs, planted and tilled and harvested and stored the vegetables, and picked and put up her own blackberries and apples. She considered it a weakness to use store-bought butter instead of churning it as she learned in her youth, but the grocer could offer it cheaper than she could make it.

Mama set a plate for me before the field hands came in. She knew, and I saw, how greedily they reached across the table for the best pieces of chicken and for second helpings. She also remembered how the grownups in her childhood sat at table first, and she was determined to change that tradition. Mama spent little time fussing over hugs and kisses or terms of endearment, but she knew the meaning of sacrificial love.

I loved Mama’s cooking, and no food has ever really tasted any better to me. She herself waited to eat what few leftovers remained. Her appetite had paled during the morning’s race to complete her cooking. She had provided her best, and she had seen it consumed within a matter of minutes. No wonder she settled for TV dinners or Long John Silver’s as a widow in retirement. Mama had done her duty as a farm wife. She had derived little pleasure from the hearty meals meant to sustain the men in the fields. The men did stop to thank her, and we never lacked field hands even when neighboring farmers complained of a shortage in laborers. For herself, though, Mama had long since learned to make do with a little. In her retirement, fast food brought relief from long hours on her feet over a hot stove. She chose convenience over comfort since she’d never really known the satisfaction of savoring food on the palate.

Her attitude changed when she shared the holidays with my husband and me. I wanted Mama to relax in my home, and she did allow me the pride and satisfaction of preparing and serving the traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. She relished, however, making bourbon balls and chocolate fudge and fruit cake cookies and the biscuits that never took shape in my hands for our festivities. I’d protest, wanting her to know we craved her presence, not her presents. “I can’t do nothing,” she would insist. “I can take my time. I don’t have to rush anymore.” So Mama and I cooked side by side in my small kitchen, sampling and laughing. Once the table was spread and grace was said, she, my husband, and I ate with as much gusto as any field hand. After all, Mama and I both knew food tastes best when someone you love cooks it.

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Register the feelings you have as you finish this version and compare them to the ones you had as you finished the first version. Pam didn’t change  the dozens to hundreds of meals but she took the opportunity to tell us more in many places that helped her come to a satisfying ending.

Upon reading only the revision, here’s what our guest contest judge Ellie Mathews wrote about this version after she chose it as a winner:

On the face of it, Pam Robinson’s wistful piece, “Table of Plenty,” is about the foods her mother cooked — and that Robinson later cooks for her mother. More than mere nostalgia for the bygone era of family farming, however, the story takes on depth with a satisfying undercurrent of emotion with a crystal clear arc and sense of completion. Kudos for not falling into sentimental territory, which would have been easy given the subject.