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The woman breathes deeply the smell of the cooking food, so hungry that she would have eaten the onion raw and relished it.
"Very well. It will, perhaps, keep my mind off my stomach for a few minutes."
Far into the woods on a lonely mountainside lived an old widow and her aged sheepdog. During the warm months, she tended her garden and spent many lovely hours outside in the lush, verdant forest, which was said to be enchanted, though the women was never foolish enough to believe such superstitious legend. During the winter months when nothing grew, when the snow was to thick to afford a journey to the village at the bottom of the mountain and not even the skeletal trees could offer solace from the biting wind, the old woman stayed inside and sat, and sat, with nothing to break the silence save for the crackling of the fire, or the whistling of the tea kettle, or the intermittent snoring of her sheepdog. She had married her husband at an old age and, after his passing, she often thought to herself how dearly she wished for a child to keep her company and to warm the house with laughter again. One winter, after a long blizzard that had kept the woman inside for some days, she went outside to enjoy the fresh, though frigid air. The snow was lovely, sparkling and pristine, and she remembered her childhood days spent playing in the snow and making snowmen with friends. Inspired, the woman knelt down and began shaping the snow into, not a snowman, but a snowbaby. When she was nearly finished, she went inside to fetch some buttons for the snowbaby's eyes. And last, she wrapped the snowbaby in an old shawl and cradled it before placing it at the foot of a nearby tree."
That night, the temperature dropped so low that the woman could not get warm no matter how many blankets she piled and so she slept in front of the fire under many layers of blankets, thinking of the princess and the pea, and feeling very much like the pea. Her dog slept so close to the fire that, in the morning, she could see that most of his whiskers were singed off. The sunshine was bright, though she guessed that it was still bitterly cold, and with the tea kettle singing merrily, the old woman had a happy and fortuitous feeling. When she removed the kettle from the stove, she thought for a moment that it continued to whistle before realizing it was not the kettle that she still heard, but a high-pitched wailing that came from outside.
"Pardon me for asking, but are those noodles done yet?"
-- Lady Lazarus

Oh, it's not for school, it's for a job, which happens to be very similar to the one for which I originally wrote the essay. And it was very good.

Sorry for the late reply; I was out for lunch with my Gram. Why do you need to write an essay for the job?

I've never heard of that before. What's the job?