Buttercup

 It’s important to be the best at something. My talent has always been knowing whether someone likes butter. It’s a secret that my grandmother taught me under the pee-gee hydrangea that canopied those who sat beneath it like a fairy tent; my grandmother on her stomach and me on my legs "criss-cross applesauce. " She delicately waved her hand over the un-mown tufts of lawn, teasing the long clumps of green grass, and when she lifted it, a buttercup would magically appear where there was only grass a moment before. She taught me how to pick only the four-petaled flowers. “Be sure they look as though they have melted butter resting in the cup,” she would tell me. “Then pick it as close to the root as possible so that your hand doesn’t make a shadow on it.” The trick was that the person who you were testing for butter had to have her face directly in the sunlight so that she had to close her eyes or go blind trying to keep them opened. Drinking in the sun with freckles would melt the butter gland in the neck. She told me that to attract this gland, it was important to lightly tickle the throat with the buttercup… not to hard, or the butter from the flower would stick rather than reveal whether they liked butter or not. Amazingly enough, my grandmother’s secret has been on the nose 100% of the time. See; I can tell. You like butter.