You'll always be my baby, Little Bear

Walking around this old house felt refreshing. This home was where Maggie grew up, raised by her great-aunt Fay. Fay was particularly fond of Maggie despite having many children of her own. The favouritism didn’t go unnoticed, but Maggie was the one who graciously took Fay in when she began to suffer from Dementia later in life. Fay passed away quietly last winter, leaving to Maggie this old house and everything in it. This house was full of warm memories for Maggie and her son Nathan. When Maggie came by with the lawyer to sign paperwork, she realized that she hadn’t been inside for many years. As she walked around, she noticed that Fay’s children had taken much of the old furniture and valuables already. But that’s not what made this place special to her.

Now, moving in, Maggie was teary eyed but content. She loved this old house.

“Mom, I can still have the bedroom with the huge window, right?” Nathan asked, pleadingly.

“Is that what we decided?” Maggie playfully pretended she didn’t remember the conversation.

Nathan rolled his eyes at his mother and with a smile ran upstairs with a box of his things.

Maggie started unpacking a few kitchen boxes. She could hear Fay’s advice ringing throughout the room as she moved around. “This house will be yours someday. Take good care of it.” As she opened the cupboard, she found a few old well-preserved dishes. “You take good care of your things and they’ll take good care of you.” Fay was funny about some things. She believed that the house had a soul of its own and protected her from harm. She would talk to it as though it was an old friend; “Oh, let me get that for you!” As she pulled down a cobweb.

She always had the most spotless kitchen. “Remember Maggie: ALWAYS keep under the kitchen sink clean. Clean it really well.”

After a simple lunch, Maggie and Nathan began to clean up.

“Mom, I think the sink is leaking. Look!”

Maggie looked into the cabinet and found a small leak that sprayed each time they turned on the water.

“Go unpack some other stuff Nate, I’ll have to fix this before we fill the sink.”

“Ok mom!” Nathan ran happily upstairs, having avoided one of his most hated chores.

Maggie went to look for the tools she would need to tighten the pipe. She found a small wrench and got down inside the cupboard to try to fix it. After a lot of effort, she managed to get it to stop. As she lay there, she noticed an old notebook stuffed into the space between the sink and the countertop. She yanked it out and sat up to look at it. It was lovely to hold, the cover made of an elegant soft black leather. The pages were brown with age, the ink faded, but the cover of the book seemed not to have aged at all, as if it were timeless. Maggie wondered if this was what Fay was trying to tell her all those years, talking about the significance of that old kitchen sink.

Opening it up carefully, Maggie found it filled with Fay’s little notes. Notes about people, places, and other odd things: reminders of birthdays, anniversaries and the names of people’s spouses and children. She had even kept track of the dates when people visited her. Maggie’s name appeared most frequently. She felt touched that Fay had hidden this for her, but wasn’t sure why it was important.

On the last page, with MAGGIE written across the top in huge letters, there was a list:

Ouch that’ll leave a scar

Where to rest after a long day stewing

Sugar and Spice

Not roses but good enough

You’ll always be my baby Little Bear

Maggie shook her head in confusion. She remembered that Fay used to call her Little Bear sometimes, but the rest seemed meaningless.

Months later, Maggie and Nathan had settled into the house. She was now talking to the house the way Fay had done but was also rearranging things to make them her own. Inside one of the pantry doors was a rather large spice rack, which Maggie wanted to hang on the wall. She took the door down and chipped the paint away from around the edges before prying the rack off the door. Behind the spice rack was an envelope. She opened the envelope and found five-hundred dollars inside. The bills were old, dating from the forties.

“How did you get all this money?” She asked the house. Maggie took the envelope upstairs and placed it in a safe spot. She thought it was impressive that Fay had been able to save up that much money and wondered for what she had been saving it and how she managed to forget about it. It was a wonderful surprise to find, and Maggie was exhilarated.

That evening, Maggie returned to the envelope and laid out the old bills on her bed.

“Is this the sugar or the spice?” she asked the house chuckling. Sugar and spice! She had seen that somewhere recently, but couldn’t remember where. That night Maggie woke with a start. The little black book!

She searched for where she had hidden it. Finding it, she gently opened it and turned to the last page. Sugar and spice. It was there, on the MAGGIE list. These little sayings were not about Maggie but for her. Each one was a riddle. Nathan and Fay used to play games and word puzzles together, but when Fay’s dementia worsened, the games mostly involved Nathan playing along to keep Fay entertained. She had left them one more game to play without her.

The next weekend, she went outside to the garden. Not roses but good enough. She wondered if she could find the plant, that wasn’t a rose. Walking around the garden, she tried to recall Fay’s little sayings. Maggie sat on the old wooden bench and looked around. They used to spend hours here together. She remembered Fay always hated the large peony that grew next to the house even though it was a gift from her daughter. “Well, I guess they’re kinda nice but they

aren’t roses”. Maggie grabbed a shovel and started digging. She heard the shovel hit something glass. Digging it up, she found a jar with a roll of money in it. “You’re crazier than I ever gave you credit for” Maggie called to the warm sky above her. Smiling, she patted the soil back around the lovely peony.

She took the jar inside and counted it. This time, she found eight-hundred and fifty dollars in bills from the fifties. She took out the book and looked at the list again. Nothing else seemed as obvious to her, but she was now sure there was more money hidden around that old house. Closing up the bills in the book, she returned the book to its spot.

Weeks went by and she still had no idea at what the other riddles were hinting. She decided to enlist her son.

“Nate, come here. Aunt Fay left us a list of riddles and I need your help solving them.”

“Really?” Nathan was intrigued. He loved playing games with Fay and the thought of one more game made his heart light up.

“Here, here is the list. I’ve found 2 already: Sugar and spice, and Roses.” Maggie showed Nathan the page in the wonderful little black notebook.

“What was she hiding?” Nathan inquired again, insisting she answer this time.

Making perfect eye contact, Maggie said “Cash.”

“Whoa! I’m in!” Nathan shouted and jumped to his feet. “What’s left?”

“Ouch that’ll leave a scar, Where to rest after a long day stewing, You’ll always be my baby Little Bear.”

“Let’s start with stewing. What stews? People stew!” Nathan’s excitement was growing.

He was pacing around the room, talking loudly, pointing up at the ceiling each time his mind pricked up. “Where do people go when they stew? But stew ALL DAY?”

Maggie knew if she couldn’t figure it out, Nathan could. She loved watching him play his last game with their beloved Fay. The two of them had been the perfect team; solving word puzzles and riddles together after dinner was the highlight of Nate’s Saturdays.

“What else stews? Foods stew!” Nathan marched into the kitchen and stood in front of the stove, both hands out in front of him as if imagining he were holding a large heavy pot of food. “So, I’ve made this stew all day, where do I rest?” He turned around to look at the rest of the kitchen. “Where does the pot rest?!” He dove down into the cupboard where Maggie kept the pots and looked around.

“Nate! She used to hang them!” Maggie shouted as she bolted for the door towards the garage. She still had the old metal frame Fay used for hanging pots and pans.

Nathan held the door for her as she brought it inside. They turned on all the lights and started to look at the metal frame. Nathan grabbed a flashlight and looked around, sticking his fingers into the tube to feel for anything.

“Does this thing come apart?” He asked his mother without breaking focus.

“Probably” Maggie replied, already half way to the tool drawer.

They found one screw that was almost stripped and carefully unscrewed the frame. Looking inside, Nathan shouted, “Look! I found it!” Nathan pulled out a roll of bills. This time, the bills were smaller denominations and more randomly collected over the years. They had found another three-hundred and seventy five dollars.

Nathan was shocked at the amount, until Maggie brought out the book and showed him how much she had already found.

Nathan began to jump around the room in a sort of eccentric celebratory dance. He stopped suddenly and looked at his mother. “Mom, we have to find the rest!”

The pair spent the day talking and thinking about the last two clues but found nothing. Maggie secretly worried that it was hidden in furniture or objects that had already been taken from the house by Fay’s children.

That was all the money the pair found for 2 years. They had forgotten about the little black book and its challenging puzzle. They continued throughout this period to renovate the house. Nathan, now 8, helped his mother whenever he could, and they had made a very beautiful home. The next project they had planned was to strip and paint the antique baseboards and doors upstairs. When Maggie brought the doors down to the garage and layed them out, Nathan noticed one was different.

“Hey mom look, this one has a sticker on it that’s been painted over once already.” He ran his hand over the buried silhouette.

“I remember that sticker. It was on my bedroom door. I think it was a pink bear holding a blanket or something. Fay used to call me her Little Bear.”

“Little Bear?” Nathan’s gaze shifted to searching over the doors edges. He found a very small slit along the top of the door and pointed it out to his mother.

“No way…” Maggie calmly replied. The pair stood looking at the door for a while before investigating. Maggie brought a drill over and made the slot wider. Nathan immediately shone a flashlight inside and froze. “What Nate? Nothing?”

“Mom, it’s full of money. How did she get so much money?” Nathan’s stunned gaze rose to meet his mothers.

They never found the last hiding place. From the three they did find, they had collected over twenty-one thousand dollars of Fay’s hidden treasure. Maggie used it for many things, but mostly saved it to help Nathan pay for University. The two often wondered what happened to “Fay’s Lost Treasure” and spent evenings together imagining elaborate stories about the people who eventually found it and how their lives were changed by it.