Hope.

there once was a girl who could bottle hope.
she stewed it in battered bulbous pots day and night until after the autumn harvest
when it was ready to be cultivated.
She toiled over the boiled liquid, staring at it with wide muddy eyes, languid
and lost in the murky pool of hope that was about to be ready for packaging.
In her kitchen she stood, starchy apron pressed firmly against her bosom like
a hopeless lover, leaning lackadaisically against the tilted edge of the ageless cobblestone counter, knowing hands firmly gripping the large old wooden spoon that had been passed to her through generations of hope bottlers, moving the spoon in circles- realizing that over the years the wood of the spoon sucked up pieces of hope from each and every batch, liquid morsels of every specially concocted batch became as much a part of the wood spoon as the maple that was once hand turned on a lathe to form it into the hope twirler that it is today.
People from far and wide would come to her every season for a chance to have a bottle of their own, knowing that the girl had a special gift and that within the round, muddled ruby liquid lay
what they had been longing for.
Through the years demand grew high, for hope was needed far and wide in times of trouble
and worry. With so many people in need of her gift, the girl who knew the recipe that had been passed from sister to mother to daughter to cousin could not give up the only thing that she knew, so she toiled and boiled and bottled and coddled.
One day, when the girl had grown into a tired, withered old woman who had seen many years of hope distributed, a man came to see her.
It was well past the season for hope to be shared, and she had given out her last bottle a month or two before. Cane in hand, wiry white wisps of hair brushing his forehead, he made his way to her doorstep. One by one he painfully climbed each step (as though he were climbing Mount Everest itself! he thought, wearily) until he reached the lopsided old porch that lead to the front door. With a creaky hope-filled knock, he awaited the answer of the one person who could save him from his dilemma . Moments later, a hobbling old woman answered the door and was shocked by the look of loss and pain inscribed on the face of the man standing before her. "I've come for a bottle of hope" he said, painfully aware that his wish was not an easy one to grant. "I stopped making it", she replied, "I'm fresh out of bottles and there are none to be found for miles around, and since no one wants hope that isn't packaged all pretty, neat, and nicely, everyone that used to come for it...just stopped, and so did I".
His mouth agape yet not allowing the tiniest sound to escape, the old man turned slowly, creaked painfully back down the steps, and continued on his path.