SSS: Six Months to Strawberry Time
“You must play for your lover, petal,” my mother’s voice breaks into my mental ramblings, so softly that for a moment I’m certain I’m imagining it. “Bid him warm himself by the parlor fire and woo him with the spindrift of your fingers over the keys.”
This remark is so unexpected, not to mention absurd, that I look up with a start, fearful that my mother is inevitably, irrevocably drifting back into that haunted dream state in which she’s dwelt for so much of my life, only to find her grinning like Prim at her wickedest and my father blushing like a schoolboy caught in misbehavior. “There was very little wooing intended, Maddi,” he protests, but weakly, and she takes one of his pale, long-fingered hands in both of hers and raises it to her lips.
“A fireside chair on a winter evening and a lover at the piano is as powerful a magic as any the Everdeens ever wrought,” she counters huskily, but her eyes are merry. “And you are as deft a magician as your father, petal.”
