Resurrections , D. Avery
There are still mason jars filled with sweet pickles, dill beans; jars of raspberry and blackberry jelly, apple-butter. The potato bin is down to the last board, but there should be plenty.
With spindly white sprouts, the potatoes feel about for spring. These are rubbed off. The potatoes need to feed us a little longer before the leftovers can go back into the ground.
The ice isn’t yet out in the lake, though peepers are singing in the beaver meadow. Soon there will be fiddleheads and wild onions, then cattail greens.
Soon enough there will be freshly dug potatoes.
Written for the Carrot Ranch flash challenge: May 4, 2017 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about comfort food. How can this familiarity influence a story or character? Is it something unusual, like Twinkies from the 1970s? Or is it something from home, from another place or time? Go where the prompt leads.
ShiftnShake 
I ache reading this, good memories, memories of my garden and raspberry patch. Sometimes, I would cut a chunk of the potato to plant the eye and eat the rest! Nothing better than fresh dug reds. A tasty flash, and deeply comforting.
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Thank you. The prompt led me immediately to the potato bin. There is something compelling about the smells there and those sprouts. The sprouts pointed me to write more to the comfort of the cycle of food, of the good feeling of having had enough through the winter and to go through the seasons again.
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Earthy smells. I like potatoes so much because they are my favorite thing to grow. I’m into hilling! One year, my lovely organic garden was too rich and the potatoes got a skin infliction. Another year I made a new patch and protected it from the resident gophers by encouraging it with onions. I learned gophers love onions and they colonized my potato patch, nearly eating every last onion and gnawing on my potatoes. That attracted the wild turkeys who love dirt bathing in gopher burrows which in turn attracted the barn cat to poop in the soft soil which attracted the coyotes to poop and eventually the gophers had enough sh** and left. I got about 5 pounds of potatoes was all! But loaded with stories.
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*encircling, I didn’t encourage onions
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I left a comment on Charli’s site. Loved this flash and the vision of surviving a cold winter and the promise of getting ready for winter again come spring.
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Thank you. I’m glad you came by; this one had kind of a Times Past feel to it.
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It did indeed and the cold climate certainly gave food a different dimension to that which I experienced in a warmer climate.
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I like the cycle of life you have shared here with the humble potato – a comfort food indeed. It can be cooked and shared in so many ways, all of them delicious! I like the thought of the potatoes feeling about for spring.
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They were in the bin, in the dark, all winter. Stored; reserved; introspective. Then- spring! What is spring, but a sprouting, a reaching, and a celebration of light?
Thank you, always, for stopping by.
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I like this. I think I would have loved living with a root cellar to keep me satisfied all winter. I did a bunch of freezing here after our CSA ended last season and we just finished the last of that bounty a week or so ago…just in time for the first spring delivery!
Spring is a wonderful time of new life, new light, and welcome sunshine. Love your response to the prompt.
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Thank you for your comments.
This was a great prompt, (thank you Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch). Everyone’s response had something to relate to.
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