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7 * GRATITUDE
May
On Mother's Day, in keeping with local tradition, we gave out tomato plants. Elsewhere this may be the genteel fete of hothouse orchids, but here the holiday's most important botanical connection is with tomatoes. Killing spring frosts may safely be presumed behind us, and it's time to get those plants into the garden.
We grow ours from seed, so it's not just the nursery-standard Big Boys for us; we raise more than a dozen different heirloom varieties. For our next-door neighbor we picked out a narrow-leaved early bearer from the former Soviet Union with the romantic name of "Silvery Fir Tree." Carrying the leggy, green-smelling plant, our family walked down the gravel driveway to her house at the bottom of our hollow.
"Oh, well, goodness," she said, taking the plant from us and admiring it. "Well, look at that."
Every region has its own language. In ours, it's a strict rule that you never say "Thank you" for a plant. I don't know why. I was corrected many times on this point, even scolded earnestly, before I learned. People have shushed me as I started to utter the words; they put their hands over their ears. "Why can't I say thank you?" I've asked. It's hard. Southern manners are so thoroughly bred into my brain, accepting a gift without a thank-you feels like walking away from changing a tire without washing my hands.
"Just don't," people insist. If you do say it, they vow, the plant will wither up straightaway and die. They have lots of stories to back this up. They do not wish to discuss whether plants have ears, or what. Just don't.
So we knew what our neighbor was trying not to say. We refrained from saying "You're welcome," had a nice Sunday afternoon visit, and managed not to jinx this plant--it grew well. Of all the tomato plants that ultimately thrived in her garden, she told us the Silvery Fir Tree was the first to bear.
On the week of May 9 we set out our own tomatoes, fourteen varieties in all: first, for early yields, Silvery Fir Tree and Siberian Early, two Russian types that get down to work with proletarian resolve, bred as they were for short summers. For a more languid work ethic but juicy mid-season flavor we grow Brandywines, Cherokee Purples, orange Jaune Flammes, and Green Zebra, which is lemony and bright green striped when fully ripe. For spaghetti sauces and canning, Martino's Roma; Principe Borghese is an Italian bred specifically for sun-drying. Everything we grow has its reason, usually practical but sometimes eccentric, like the Dolly Partons given us by an elderly seed-saving friend. ("What do the tomatoes look like?" I asked. She cupped her hands around two enormous imaginary orbs and mugged, "Do you have to ask?") Most unusual, probably, is an old variety called Long Keeper. The fruits never fully ripen on the vine, but when harvested and wrapped in newspaper before frost, they slowly ripen by December.
That's just the tomatoes. Also in the second week of May we set out pepper seedlings and direct-seeded the corn, edamame, beets, and okra. Squash and cucumber plants went into hills under long tents of row-cover fabric to protect them from cool nights. We weeded the onions, pea vines, and potatoes; we planted seeds of chard, bush beans, and sunflowers, made bamboo tepees for the pole beans, and weathered some spring thunderstorms. That's one good week in food-growing country.
By mid-month, once warmth was assured, we and all our neighbors set out our sweet potato vines (there was a small melee down at the Southern States co-op when the management underordered sweet-potato sets). We also put out winter squash, pumpkins, basil seedlings, eggplants, and melons, including cantaloupes, honeydews, rock melons, perfume melons, and four kinds of watermelons. Right behind planting come the weeding, mulching, vigilance for bugs and birds, worry over too much rain or not enough. It so resembles the never-ending work and attention of parenting, it seems right that it all should begin on Mother's Day.
For people who grow food, late spring is the time when we pay for the relative quiet of January, praying for enough hours of daylight to get everything done. Many who farm for a living also have nine-to-five jobs off the farm and still get it done. In May we push deadlines, crunch our other work, borrow time, and still end up parking the tractor with its headlamp beams pointed down the row to finish getting the last plants heeled into place. All through May we worked in rain or under threat of it, playing chicken with lightning storms. We worked in mud so thick it made our boots as heavy as elephant feet. On work and school days we started pre-dawn to get an early hour in, then in the late afternoon picked up again where we'd left off. On weekends we started at daybreak and finished after dusk, aching and hungry from the work of making food. Labors like this help a person appreciate why good food costs what it does. It ought to cost more.
In the midst of our busy spring, one of us had a birthday. Not just a run-of-the-mill birthday I could happily ignore, but an imposing one, involving an even fraction of one hundred. We cooked up a party plan, setting the date for Memorial Day so out-of-town guests could stay for the long weekend. We sent invitations and set about preparing for a throng of guests, whom we would certainly want to feed. Our normal impulse would have been to stock up on standard-issue, jet-propelled edibles. But we were deep enough into our local-food sabbatical by now, that didn't seem entirely normal.
Something had changed for us, a rearrangement of mindset and the contents of our refrigerator. Our family had certainly had our moments of longing for the illicit: shrimp, fresh peaches, and gummy worms, respectively. Our convictions about this project had been mostly theoretical to begin with. But gradually they were becoming fixed tastes that we now found we couldn't comfortably violate for our guests, any more than a Hindu might order up fast-food burgers just because she had a crowd to feed.
It put us in a bit of a pickle, though, to contemplate feeding a huge crowd on the products of our county this month. If my mother had borne me in some harvest-festival month like October, it would have been easy. But she (like most sensible mammals, come to think of it) had all her children in the springtime, a fact I'd never minded until now. Feeding just my own household on the slim pickings of our local farms had been a challenge in April. The scene was perking up in May, but only slightly. Our spring had been unusually wet and cool, so the late-spring crops were slow coming in. We called a friend who cooks for a living, who came over to discuss the game plan.
Apparently, the customary starting point for caterers in a place that lacks its own food culture is for the client to choose a food theme that is somebody else's land-based food culture. Then all you have to do is import the ingredients from somebody else's land. Mediterranean? A banquet of tomato-basil-mozzarella salads, eggplant caponata, and butternut ravioli--that's a crowd pleaser. And out of the question. No tomatoes or eggplants yet existed in our landscape. Our earliest of early tomatoes was just now at the blossom stage. Mexican? Enchiladas and chipotle rice? Great, except no peppers or tomatillos were going to shine around here. Siberian Tundra was maybe the cuisine we were after. We began to grow glum, thinking of borscht.
Not to worry, said Kay. A good food artist knows her sources. She would call the farmers she knew and see what they had. Starting with ingredients, we'd build our menu from there. As unusual as this might seem, it is surely the world's most normal way of organizing parties--the grape revels of Italy and France in September, the Appalachian ramp hoedowns in April, harvest festivals wherever and whenever a growing season ends. That's why Canadian Thanksgiving comes six weeks before ours: so does Canadian winter. We were determined to have a feast, but if we meant to ignore the land's timetable of generosity and organize it instead around the likes of birthdays, a good travel weekend, and the schedules of our musician friends, that was our problem.
Kay called back with a report on our county's late May pantry. There would be asparagus, of course, plus lots of baby lettuces and spinach by then. Free-range eggs are available here year-round. Our friend Kirsty had free-range chicken, and the Klings, just a few miles from us, had gr
ass-fed lamb. The Petersons had strawberries, Charlie had rhubarb, another family was making goat cheese. White's Mill, five miles from our house, had flour. If we couldn't pull together a feast out of that, I wasn't worth the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award I won in 1972. (Kind of by accident, but that is another story.)
The menu wrote itself: Lamb kabobs on the grill, chicken pizza with goat cheese, asparagus frittata, an enormous salad of spring greens, and a strawberry-rhubarb crisp. To fill out the menu for vegan friends we added summer rolls with bean sprouts, carrots, green onions, and a spicy dipping sauce. We had carrots in the garden I had nursed over the winter for an extra-early crop, and Camille ordinarily grew bean sprouts by the quart in our kitchen windowsill; she would ramp up her production to a couple of gallons. We might feed our multitudes after all.
As the RSVPs rolled in, we called farmers to plead for more strawberries, more chickens. They kindly obliged. The week of the party, I cut from our garden the first three giant heads of Early Comet broccoli--plants we'd started indoors in February and set out into nearly frozen soil in March. Without knowing it, I'd begun preparing for this party months ago. I liked seeing now how that whole process, beginning with seeds, ending with dinner, fixed me to some deeper than usual sense of hospitality. Anyone who knows the pleasure of cooking elaborately for loved ones understands this. Genesis and connection with annual cycles: by means of these, a birthday could be more than a slap on the back and jokes about memory loss.
On Tuesday, four days pre-party, Camille and I hoed weeds from around corn seedlings and planted ten hills of melons for some distant, future party: maybe we'd have corn and cantaloupe by Lily's birthday in July. By dusk the wind was biting our ears and the temperature was falling fast. We hoped the weather would turn kinder by this weekend. We expected well over a hundred people--about thirty spending the weekend. Rain would wreck any chance for outdoor dancing, and camping in the yard would be grim. We scowled at the clouds, remembering (ruefully) the cashier who'd jinxed the rain in Tucson. We weren't in drought here, so we decided we could hope with impunity. And then take what came.
On Wednesday we checked the bean sprouts Camille had started in two glass gallon jars. Their progress was unimpressive; if they intended to fill out a hundred fat, translucent summer rolls in three days, they had some work to do. We tried putting them in a sunnier window, but the day was cloudy. Suddenly inspired, we plugged in a heating pad and wrapped it around the jars. Just an hour did the trick. I'm sure we violated some principle of Deep Ecology, but with just a quick jolt from the electric grid our sprouts were on their way, splitting open their seeds and pushing fat green tails into the world.
On Thursday I went to the garden for carrots, hoping for enough. With carrots you never know what you've got until you grab them by the green hair and tug them up. These turned out to be gorgeous, golden orange, thicker than thumbs, longer than my hand. Shaved into slivers with green onions and our indolent sprouts, two dozen carrots would be plenty. I could only hope the lambs and chickens were cooperating as well. I stood for a minute clutching my carrots, looking out over our pasture to Walker Mountain on the horizon. The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don't say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.
Guests began to trickle in on Friday: extended family from Kentucky, old college friends from South Carolina, our musician friends John, Carrie, and Robert. I was bowled over by the simultaneous presence of so many people I care about, from as far away as Tucson and as near as next door. We made all the beds and couches, and pitched tents. We walked in the garden and visited. All those under age twelve welded into a pack and ran around like wild things. I overheard a small platoon leader in the garden command: "You, whatever your name is, go down that way and I'll hide and we'll scare the girls." I only made two rules: Don't injure each other, and don't flatten the crops. With the exception of one scraped finger and the tiniest mishap with a Dolly Parton, they obliged.
We set up a sound system on the back patio, dragged bales of straw into benches, and eyed the sky, which threatened rain all day Saturday but by late afternoon had not delivered. We carried a horse trough out of the barn and filled it with ice to chill our Virginia Chambourcin and Misty River wines, and beer from a nearby microbrewery. The lamb kabobs on the grill made all our mouths water for an hour while Kay and her helpers worked their mojo in our kitchen. The food, when it came out, was applauded: the summer rolls were saucy, the lamb succulent, the frittata puffy and light. The strawberry-rhubarb crisp vanished into thin air. Here's what we didn't have: the shrimp arranged in a ring like pink poker chips; those rock-hard broccoli wedges and lathed carrots surrounding the ubiquitous white dip; the pile of pineapple and melon chunks on a platter. Nobody seemed too disappointed.
Some of us were in fact sticking our fingers into the rhubarb-crisp pans to lick up crumbs when the music started. The three-year-olds were the first ones out on the flagstone dance floor, of course, followed closely by my seventy-five-year-old parents, the teenagers and the elders and the middle-aged, recklessly dancing across age categories. And it still didn't rain. Nobody fell in the creek, nobody went hungry, and nobody's husband refused to dance. When the night chilled us we built a huge bonfire, and nobody fell into that either. Midnight found me belting out backup harmonies with my cousin Linda to "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones. The over-fifty crowd stayed on its feet until two in the morning. You get what you need.
I'd asked for no presents. The stuff-acquisition curve of my life has long since peaked and lately turned into a campaign against accumulation, with everyday skirmishes on the kitchen table. Not just mail and school papers, either, I mean stuff on that table. (Shoes, auto parts, live arthropods in small wire cages.) "No presents," I said. "Really." But here in Dixie we will no more show up to a party empty-handed than bare-bottomed, because that's how we were raised. A covered dish is standard, but was unnecessary in this case. To make everyone comfortable we had to suggest an alternative.
Camille made the call, and it was inspired: a plant. The tiniest posy, anything would serve. And truthfully, while we'd put prodigious efforts into our vegetable garden and orchards, our front yard lay sorry and neglected. Anything people might bring to set into that ground would improve it. Thus began the plan for my half-century Birthday Garden: higgledy-piggledy, florescent and spontaneous, like friendship itself.
This is what my friends brought: dug from their own backyards, a division of a fifty-year-old peony, irises, a wisteria vine, spicy sweetshrub, beebalm, hostas, datura, lilies, and a flowering vine whose name none of us knows. My parents brought an Aristocrat pear, a variety bred by an old friend from our hometown. A geographer friend brought Portuguese collards, another indulged my fondness for red-hot chile peppers. Rosemary and sage, blueberry and raspberry, fountain grass, blue sweetgrass, sunshine-colored roses, blue-and-white columbines, scarlet poppies, butterfly bush and "Sunset" echinacea--the color scheme of my garden is "Crayola." Our neighbor, to whom we'd taken the tomato plant, dug some divisions of her prettiest lemon lilies. "Oh, well, goodness," I said as I received each of these botanical gifts. "Well, look at that."
I thanked my parents for having me, thanked the farmers for the food, thanked family and friends for the music, the dancing, the miles traveled, and the stunning good luck of having them all in my life. But I did not say "Thank you" for a plant. My garden lives.
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Happy Returns
BY CAMILLE
Birthdays have always been a big deal in my family. Mom would cook exactly what we wanted for dinner and bake any kind of cake for Lily and me on our special days. Our only limit was the one-year, one-person rule: each year I could invite as many people to my party as the age I was turning.
So, three kids at my three-year-old party, ten at my tenth. As you can probably guess, things got increasingly wild. At one point I remember asking, "Mama, when I turn thirty can I really have thirty people at my party?" I was shocked when she said, "Sure, absolutely." Wow, I thought, excited already at the thought of that huge celebration. Now I just think it's funny that I assumed I'd still be living with my parents on my thirtieth birthday.
Last spring when my mom turned fifty she broke her own rule, big-time. None of us minded. What could be better than a long weekend of live music, good food, and friends and family from all over? We spent weeks setting up for 150 guests and trying to come up with a perfect Plan B (which we never really did) if it rained. I was inspired to see so many people in the fifty-plus age group up and dancing well past midnight, grandparents included. I hope I'll still be dancing--and breaking my own rules--when I'm that age.
Two of our friend Kay's best recipes from that party are good ways to feature the early spring vegetables, and the only fruits you're likely to find in May: strawberries and rhubarb.
ASIAN VEGETABLE ROLLS
2 oz. thin rice noodles
Drop noodles into boiling water, remove from heat, and let stand for 8-10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain, rinse with cold water, and drain again.
1 cup bean sprouts
10 soft lettuce leaves
1 cup carrots, finely shredded
2 to 3 green onions, finely chopped
1/2 cup mint leaves
1/2 cup cilantro leaves
8 rice paper wrappers (about 8 inches square)
Lay out noodles and vegetables in an assembly line. Heat a pan of water until it's almost too hot to handle. Soak one rice paper wrapper in the hot water for 15-20 seconds, then take it out and lay it flat. Flatten out one lettuce leaf on top (this helps prevent other fillings from poking through the wrapper). Next, place a finger-sized bunch of noodles close to one side of the paper and roll that side over the noodles. Continue this same pattern for the vegetable fillings, laying each ingredient parallel to the noodles and rolling the paper over. After the mint and cilantro leaves have gone in, fold the ends of the wrapper in, then fold the remaining side over them to secure. Set roll on a platter, seam side down. Keep rolls moist until served, and separated so they don't stick together (the wrappers will rip).
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Page 12
