Of course, Mother claimed that I was just getting extra protein, and anyway, since the worms had fed on nothing but stinging nettles all their lives, their composition didn’t differ much from the delicacy in question.
Only many years later, while living in France, did I learn to make and appreciate nettle soup, mixing the leaves with potatoes and broth and garlic and heavy cream, and puréeing the composite to be sure that, in case any worms had managed to escape my vigilant washings they would be unrecognizable to the next person in the food chain.
But to return to my pokeberry plant, I had now located the secret ingredients to the coveted beautiful nails that would be the envy of all my classmates tomorrow. Never mind if I shocked my mother on the way; she would get over it quickly—she always did.
And tomorrow I would hold my place with the best of the dressed.
Huckleberry Picking
On huckleberry-picking day, the whole family got up at four o’clock. We breakfasted quickly and drove up the Fire Bald, from which we walked out towards the White Rocks, a gash of granite cliffs that we could see glinting in the sun from our own side of the mountain.
We knew we must reach the Beauty Spot in the cool hours of early morning and pick as much as possible before noon, when the sun rises too high for comfort. At least, that was Mother and Daddy’s plan. Tim and I, at two and four, were a little young yet to be roped into being any useful help. But at least we were good at occupying ourselves while our parents were off sweating and getting eaten alive by chiggers.
I’m still astounded to think of the faith Mother and Daddy had that no danger would befall us when they left us for long hours alone to play behind a rock. This was rattlesnake country, and huckleberry patches are known to be among their favorite hideouts. Of course we had been alerted as to what a buzzing rattle sounds like, and told to make lots of noise so as not to take a sleeping reptile by surprise. Still, we were very small and close to the ground, and if a rattler had taken a fancy to use us for target practice, we would not have survived the dose of poison.
But this didn’t scare us, somehow. The faith that our parents held in us transformed two natural wanderers into semi-prudent children, who played next to the same rock for an entire morning until Mother and Daddy returned, baskets brimming over with beautiful wild berries. And children unscathed.
At home we picked over the wealth, like gold in our hands, letting the deep purply huckleberries slide through our fingers into a large enamel pan, throwing away the bits of sticks and leaves that had inevitably slipped in amongst them. When the task drew to a close we turned the baskets upside-down and shook them to get the very last of the blue gold out of the corners.
The baskets were ones Mother and Daddy had made out of poplar bark, peeled off the tree when the sap was high, each one folded out of a single piece and laced up with inner strips of hickory bark. Their special shape, concave at the bottom—like an inverted football—made them perfect for berry-picking because they fit onto your hip, or could balance on your leg propped up on a rock. They could also be made right on the spot, albeit a slightly rougher version than my parents’ carefully crafted ones. You could take your piece of bark off a live tree with a pocket knife and lace it up with rawhide, if you happened to have any in your lunch sack, or with honeysuckle vines or spruce roots. Hickory bark took more time to prepare, although it was as beautiful as leather when well done, and tougher.
As the sun sank behind the mountain where we had watched it rise that morning, and the last huckleberry had been shaken from the crevasses of the poplar bark, we sighed with pleasure. For dinner, we would have a juicy pie stuffed full of the steaming, delicate berries. For breakfast, we would have pancakes, polka-dotted blue with maple syrup floating around them. Next morning, it would be blueberry muffins with butter melted into their hot centers. And with tea, we would have toast and blueberry jam. In the canhouse with the winter goods would be pint ball jars of the wild mountain berries, drowning in their own sweet syrup with a little honey added for good measure. And on Christmas morning we would open one to celebrate the occasion, and feel once more the heat of the rock cliffs and hear a far-away rattle as we savored our blue gold on a cold and frosty morning.
The Neighbor Girl
The nearest neighbor girl was slim and wiry. She was two years younger than I, and could run faster. More than run, she flew. I’m not sure exactly how she did it, because I, too, was a good runner. But no matter how well I started out in a race, leaning forward and going with all the speed of my young sinew, she always managed to slip ahead. Her feet knew no limit.
She was suntanned—a farmer’s tan, people called it—with the mark of her shirt sleeves visible halfway up her arm. We saw each other on Sundays, because every other day of the week she had to help in the fields. Sometimes I would come over the narrow trail that ran through the woods between our two farms and help her tie tomatoes or pick beans or strip tobacco plants. When the tobacco was being put up and laid in golden rows, we’d follow along behind the grown workers and pick up the leaves that were dropped, fastening them together with a rubber band and laying them carefully aside. Each leaf was precious.
It was hard work for a child of less than five years, but she knew nothing else. Her older sisters set out the young tobacco plants and walked along the tomato rows with a sprayer that carried deadly poison. They, too, knew nothing else.
When at last we were allowed to play, we climbed up to the hayloft, where we might see a blacksnake wriggle through a knothole, leaving his skin behind him. Or we might see a black widow spider scurrying up a crack. Keeping a safe distance from these native inhabitants of our territory, we found passages among the hay bales where we could crawl in search of a hidden room.
Sometimes we picked up old things we found lying around the barn’s dusty floor, like an empty medicine bottle, which we would stuff with boxwood leaves to keep in our food store. The little round leaves always smelled to me like dog piss, especially when they had been enclosed in an airtight container for a few hours. We kept them on hand to offer to Old Hic if he should happen to walk by.
We would also roll down the hill above her house, over and over until we were so dizzy we couldn’t stand and our heads seemed to be our feet and our stomachs seemed to be our heads. The chickens had been scratching there, and we often came out of our rolling sessions with polka-dotted blouses, which didn’t help our stomachs any.
What did help was to go down to the grape arbor and crawl underneath, where the grapes hung covered with morning dew. We could eat until we were sick, and nobody would miss anything, there were so many of them. When we’d had our fill we’d run into the kitchen and pull open the drawer where we knew the biscuits were kept. They were even better when they were a day old and just a little bit hard, smelling of lard and Martha White self-rising flour. We could have all we wanted of them, too, because what we didn’t eat would go to the dog—or to the hog— when the day’s fresh biscuits came out of the oven, nectar to a Southern tongue.
The Arse House
There is a house on the farm where the neighbor girl grew up that slants angularly, barely held up by its decaying stone chimney. The stones are small, drawn from the surrounding field. The mortar is red clay, riddled with mud wasps. To the right is a tin-roofed shed and a haying wagon. The floor is bare dirt, once trod by a family of feet, equally bare.
If you dare to step across the rough-hewn door sill, you find bushel baskets long empty, along with leftover corn cobs and quarts of dated motor oil meant for farm vehicles. There is a discarded shoe or two and an old battered frying pan most recently used to feed a dog. Somewhere to the left of the front door frame is a bullet hole, which a neighbor pointed out to Daddy one day when he came back to help put in a culvert to divert standing water in the field.
The story of the bullet hole goes like this: Some years back—more than anyone can quite remember—a young couple, just married, moved into the Arse house (so called for the man who b
uilt it). About three weeks into their nuptial bliss, they decided to have a party and invited friends to “set” on the porch and sip on whatever beverage might have been at hand.
It seems the young husband looked a little too closely at another young lady who was present, and his new wife grabbed her rifle and shot him. Her aim was good.
Arse’s brother was named Armp. One of Armp’s sons was Dominow, known to his family as “Minner.” Minner played the fiddle, banjo and guitar, and Daddy would take me down to listen to his tunes whenever he could. I was fascinated by the fiddle, held up against the shoulder, played with horsehair rubbed with rosin, leaving a cloud of white on the instrument’s face after a particularly stirring dance tune. Most of the tunes were for dancing, and I learned to shuffle my heels and drag my toes as a way to keep my balance at the same time as I was learning to walk. Minner played “Snow Bird” and “Polly Put the Kettle On,” both lonesome melodies with extra measures that sounded like they had been added just to confound the guitar player.
I loved the names of the fiddle parts: the apron, the frog, the f-holes, the bridge, the scroll, the sound post. Daddy had a rattlesnake rattle in his old red fiddle. It was cut from the tail of a rattler that crawled out of the weeds beside the shack that was my first home, on the very first day my parents moved in. Neighbor Red Raymond (named for his red shock of hair) killed it with a hoe, and Daddy cut off the rattles and dried them, later storing them inside the body of his instrument to keep dust balls from gathering. When you picked his fiddle up out of the case, the rattles would sound ominously, daring whoever might touch the strings to be worth his salt, or take the consequences.
Many’s the night I went to sleep to the sound of my Daddy playing the fiddle. The haunting melodies like “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Black Mountain Rag,” rich in drones, would carry me to places far away in the British Isles, from whence many of the tunes came. I could hear the bagpipe in the drones, feel the mist from the moor, step inside castles I had read about in fairy tales and in National Geographic, dance with a prince…
Christmas
Christmas morning holds magic for all children. Stars hang low, frost waits on the window panes. The parents have just collapsed wearily in their beds when the children awaken, gleefully unaware of all that has been going on during their dreams.
You are a child. You reach for your pocket flashlight under your pillow and shine it on the clock next to your bed. Four minutes past five. You listen carefully, and think you can hear sleigh bells jingling in the far distance. Just a faint sound and then it is gone, and you wonder if it could be real or if it is still part of your dreams. You push back your down quilt that holds the warmth of your body, you feel for your slippers so that your feet won’t touch the cold floor, you pull your woolen bathrobe around you, and tiptoe stealthily down the stairs, almost bursting with suspense.
The suspense has been building steadily all month as you sang carols and glued colored strips of paper together into chains, and made popcorn balls with sticky syrup and decorated star- and Santa-shaped cookies with sugar and cinnamon and almonds. You smelled beeswax and linseed oil exuding from your Daddy’s shop. You knew he had been polishing a wooden object and you tried to imagine everything it might possibly be, from a rocking chair to a racehorse. Your mother turned her back on you for a few moments when you came in from making snow angels, and you could heard a rustle of paper and she wore a very mysterious expression when she finally faced you and asked if you would like a hot chocolate or eggnog.
The day before you had smelled pies when you walked past the kitchen, mingled with the sage and onions of the turkey stuffing, and the brandy of the plum pudding that had been sent in a heavily-wrapped package by one of your aunts. And you had picked up the nutcracker as you passed the table and opened an English walnut (a special seasonal substitute for the black walnuts of every day), which you popped into your watering mouth as you tried not to be too much underfoot and not to ask too many questions.
And that night you had sung carols and had a small sip of hot mulled wine and read “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and hung your stocking carefully by the fireplace. And when you were sent off to bed, it had seemed that you would never fall asleep.
Now you lift the latch—gently, gently—and the door gives way to a wonderland of wrappings and ribbons and good scents. And you don’t know where to look first: to the fireplace which is still making soft noises as smoke escapes the layer of ashes which one of your tired parents has banked over the coals; to the stockings which are stuffed to overflowing with strange bulges down near the toe; to the lake of presents surrounding the tree in their many-colored papers and mysterious shapes and sizes…or to the tree itself, hung with lights which give a warm glow to the waiting room, topped with a silver cardboard star, reflecting a blue light, shining a gentle peace into your heart.
You stand still a moment and breathe deeply, and the tang of evergreen reaches your nostrils, and you are suddenly thankful for all that has been and will be. And most of all for NOW.
And you dive for your stocking, and the unveiling of mysteries begins.
Our Christmas
Our Christmas lasted for months, it seemed. Although never long enough, we stretched it out as much as could be considered fairly possible.
We had a self-imposed rule that we could only sing Christmas carols during the month of December and on New Year’s Day. This was designed to keep them special, as we wouldn’t want to wear them out before their season came. And there were plenty of other songs to sing all year long, anyway.
Sometimes Tim and I couldn’t wait, and we staged a Christmas of our own, belting out “Deck the Halls” and “Joy to the World” to the woods in September. And the red golden leaves joined in our joy as the birds chirruped along with our chorus, and we felt it was a fine thing to celebrate Christmas at any time of year you chose.
But these were only isolated moments, and when the first of December arrived, we sang the beloved carols all day long, played our favorite records of them during meals, and gathered together as a family at night, to sing them in parts. We also had a favorite book of Christmas stories with extracts from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (“Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit…”), the story of Babushka, the Christmas Cuckoo, and a wonderful illustrated tableau of The Night Before Christmas, with Clement C. Moore’s version of jolly old St. Nick.
From this book Daddy read us one story every night until Christmas, even until the New Year, with Tim and me hanging on to either side of him, drinking in the pictures. And when the description of a certain festive meal or merry exchange was just too good, Daddy got out his red handkerchief and wiped away the tears that had begun streaming down his face, swallowed once or twice, shook his head in enjoyment of the scene that got better every year, and continued on, tremulous.
Meanwhile, Mother would sketch the faces of her family, or work on a piece of sewing for Christmas, or bring steaming hot drinks in from the kitchen to soothe emotional throats, or distribute candy canes. And we would all fall silent for a moment, save for a chorus of eager slurping and a few ahh’s of contentment.
No one was allowed to go in Daddy’s shop during this magical, mysterious month, and the sounds and scents that issued forth were enough to make any child delirious with waiting. The things which came out of it to be discovered on Christmas morn were worth all the delirium: a smoothly sanded marble slide that zigged and zagged back and forth; a pack of bow and arrows, skillfully feathered from our own rooster’s tail; a workbench one year for my brother and a desk for me, slanted at a drafter’s angle; shelves with our names carved in them and all kinds of tiny drawers for storing pocket knives and chalk and arrowheads and foreign coins; outdoor chairs, Adirondack-style, tailored to each person’s size; and, best of all, one year was a playhouse, big enough for a folding table and a couple of chairs within, and a few candles for atmosphere, and a shelf of most treasured books and games.
I was the first to dis
cover this prize on one of those five o’clock mornings when I padded downstairs with my flashlight, and I held my breath in astonishment at this miniature place of our own. Daddy had made real window panes and an arched doorway, and there was a soft light seeping outward to greet me. Mother had painted the walls a warm cozy red and the roof and door and shutters in green, and she had even painted flowers climbing up on either side of the doorway.
I slipped silently, wonderingly, inside where brand new sleeping bags were awaiting each member of the family. Then I slipped back out to make sure my own lumpy hand-made packages were in place, took my stocking gently off the hook, and crawled back into the private sanctuary to savor Christmas at its best.
Of course it wasn’t long till Tim joined me, and then, after what seemed like hours, our parents came sleepy-eyed down the steps, croaking “Good morning” and “Merry Christmas” in hoarse but forgiving voices. Then there were blueberry muffins and hot maple syrup and scrambled eggs and bacon, and we could even have a taste of coffee if we wanted it before we got into our Christmas chocolates. And when stomachs were satisfied, we were allowed to attack the tantalizing pile flowing out from under the tree limbs.
The tree itself was a wonder, and one of the most special events of the season was going out to find it. The whole family went, including the dog and a couple of cats. All wrapped up in downy jackets and woolen hats and mittens and scarves, we made a varied pattern of footprints across the snow. A few winters, when the snow was really deep, we strapped on snowshoes which Daddy had hung onto since his winter mountaineering days. This only heightened the sense of adventure, although the woven wood and sinew paws were not always easy to navigate. One of us inevitably got our heels crossed and went tumbling headlong into the powdery snow and got little icy crystals up our sleeves and down our neck and in our boots. We were wide awake then, and hurried on with new speed, set to dry out before freezing up.
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