A good student, a stellar athlete, a dancer, articulate, funny, polite — it isn’t fair that Emilia Wilkerson is also an accomplished 4-H’er with a slate of top-quality projects in the works for this year’s Allen County Fair.
Last Tuesday — which also happened to be Wilkerson’s 10th birthday — the third-year Prairie Dell member sat before a binder, the word “TREES” artfully decorating its laminated front.
“This is for my forestry project,” said Wilkerson, opening the binder to reveal page after page of the native Kansas leaves she’s collected across the span of two years. Each leaf is selected for its representative quality. Wilkerson rejects the bug-eaten, broken-stemmed leaves that carpet the nearby parks and trails from which she draws her haul, training her attention instead on the largely unblemished specimens. “And we always make sure to grab a few extra,” she explained, “just in case something happens to one of them. Me and my dad, we usually go out on our bikes or we drive around and we find them.”
Having returned the leaves to her north Iola home, Wilkerson presses them and then mounts the leaves in her album with a little clear glue and a small label describing the leaf’s provenance — “White Ash / Elm Creek Park South / 7-17-17.”
“She can mount a leaf for you today, if you’d like,” offers Sandy Wilkerson, Emilia’s mother. “I know all of this is an education for you too. … Do you want to show him the leaf press, Emilia?”
Emilia leads the way into the garage, where she does her pressing.
Preparing my mind for a contraption — the “leaf presser” — whose particulars I can’t quite picture, I point to the first appliance that strikes my eye. “Wow” I exclaim, indicating lamely in the direction of a handled, dome-shaped object in the corner of the garage, which I presume is the leaf presser. “That’s neat, Emilia! Now, what is it called again?”
She looks confused. “That’s our grill.”
“Right.”
“The leaf press is actually over here,” she explains.
The leaf press is behind the grill! [In my defense, the Wilkersons own a very nice, unusual-looking ceramic grill.] Wilkerson’s actual leaf press is a small stack of cardboard squares with a weight pressing down on the stack. Each perfect leaf Wilkerson finds is placed between the cardboard panels and left there until the moisture is wicked from the specimens and they’re ready to mount.
Wilkerson removes a leaf from her press. It’s a glossy green leaf, about the size of a toddler’s foot, in the shape of a near-perfect fleur-de-lis. “This,” says Wilkerson, “is a mulberry leaf.”
BUT THE nature-loving Wilkerson’s talents run toward the domestic, too. Besides forestry, she is enrolled to compete in the fair’s clothing buymanship, clothing construction, knitting and foods events.
Wilkerson has already competed in clothing construction twice across her short 4-H career. “This is my third year, third dress,” said Wilkerson.
But the 2017 number is the product of much loftier ambitions. Where her previous dresses were basic, straight-hem affairs, this year’s dress is a tissue- or handkerchief-hem dress, whose signature virtue is its stylishly uneven cut.
Wilkerson’s recent experiences in the kitchen have involved canning carrots and drying grapes, but at this year’s fair she’ll be flying her dessert flag. Her showpieces, which Wilkerson relates with palpable elation, are a chocolate cake with Twinkie petals and a batch of the very finest snickerdoodles.
