by Edi Holley
Sometimes Rachel:,’ would say, “C’mon, let’s go down to the woods and have a party on the witches’ tables.” We would hurry to find the tin pail for water in case we stopped at the spring. Down through the tall grass we went. Midway down the field we came to a clearing in the grass formed by a circle of red bricks which defined the top of the spring. A small green frog sat on guard, puffing up his yellowy green chest before the leap. We leaned over and looked down at the frothy green moss that covered the water. Rachel lowered the rusty pail by its wire handle, to part the water, drawing back the curtain of green so that blue sky reflected from above and the sun’s eye blinded us with its gleam. “Kerplunk,” went the frog. A fountain of gray sand bubbled up from the bottom. We waited for it to clear so we could see deep down to where the rivulets of cold spring water jetted up. Rachel lowered the pail even further. We all held onto her skirt so she wouldn’t fall in. We took turns having a sip of the purest freshest water I have ever tasted. We let the pail down once more to fill it for Edee, who was busy baking a blueberry pie.
Now we looked toward the dappled light of the woods. They were edged by large rocks, a testament to the ancient New England practice of clearing fields in times gone by. Flickering shadows behind the trees seemed to beckon. Could they be witches? We crossed the deep ditches that Grampa kept open to drain the fields. We slid into slippery clay that oozed over the tops of our sneakers. Wonderful plants were everywhere–Queen Anne’s Lace, yellow Goldenrod, lavender Asters, and long dry feathery grasses that tickled our legs.
“Ooooooo!” sighed Rachel as she bent to pick a small clump of her favorite bright red Bunch Plums.
The witches’ rocks were almost flat and carved- looking, covered with gray green lichen. We gathered around one rock and began to cast around for any witches who might be there, halfway hoping they weren’t. “Will Thee have a cup of tea?” I asked, using the “plain language”, like Grampa. We held imaginary tea cups and arranged a bouquet of tiny white wood blossoms in the center of our “table.” We sipped our “tea”
and offered Rachel a piece of imaginary cake. Suddenly Rachel whispered, “I feel a presence! It must be Hepsibah. She loves to come for tea. I think she wants to sit next to you, Edaik.” Shivers went down my spine as I edged over on my rock chair so I almost fell off. Somehow I could feel her presence. I was so quiet I could hear my own breath. Then I heard twigs snapping and suddenly there was an enormous brown head poking through the branches, and two startled eyes rolled above us. “Mooooooooo!” I could feel herthe cow’s breath as her chin whiskers tickled me!
Our tea party was over. We bolted out of the woods and back through the fields to the saftysafety of the farm kitchen, where Edee had a delicious lunch of real food waiting, including warm blueberry pie made with blueberries Rachel had freshly picked.
In late October Rachel set out with a basket under her arm to collect all the fallen hickory nuts, along the road and in the big lot behind the barn where Grampa stacked lumber for sale. Rachel brought her baskets of nuts home and spread them out in Grampa’s carpentry shop to dry. When they were dry Edee and Rachel would crack them with hammers on old fashioned soap stones after supper. Soap stones were heated on the back of the wood stove at night and slipped into the bottom of the bed so that when you went to bed your toes would be nice and toasty warm. They also made a heavy, hard surface for cracking nuts with a hammer.
After they had cracked the nuts they would pry out the meats with lobster picks. Edee was very good at it and was able to get out whole meats. Rachel, not so much. Surreptitiously she slipped them into her mouth. I think she felt entitled since she had done all the hard foraging out in the cold scrabbling with the squirrels and the gypsies. When enough nuts had accumulated, Edee roasted and salted them lightly in the oven. We had them after Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.
Pies and cranberry sauce were made for Thanksgiving. Edee made her own mincemeat using a meat grinder with spices and apples and ginger and raisins. It was a rich and delicious desert served hot. Rachel would always ask for seconds.
CHRISTMAS
Edee started a few weeks early to make Christmas puddings. She got out the enormous brown bowl in which she sifted flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and ginger which made the air fragrant with spices. Next she got out a big wooden spoon and mooshed soft butter into the mixture of molasses and yogurt. She mixed this with the dry ingredients. Finally she added raisins, dates, crushed pineapple, cherries, lemon zest. She stirred this mixture into beautiful copper molds. Then she covered and steamed them two to three hours on top of stove in a large kettle. Several times during the process we had to carefully pour water into the kettle so they didn’t burn on the bottom. By this time the room was filled with the most delicious smell that you couldn’t wait for a taste. At last she placed them out in a cold room. They were served hot with hard sauce or French Vanilla ice-cream. They were just so yummy they made your toes curl up with pleasure.
For our Christmas decorations Edee made beautiful wreaths of greens. I carried the basket and cutters. We cut as many different varieties as we could find: blue spruce, pine mistletoe, hemlock with tiny golden brown dancing cones, juniper with pretty gray blue berries. Then we would sit on the kitchen couch with our basket of greens on the floor and weave the greens one by one into a lovely circular wreath. How beautiful they looked…and what a heavenly woodsy fragrance. She hung one on the front door, one on the kitchen door and one on each of the barn doors.
Now and then we could hear a faint jingle of bells from Grampa’s old sleigh that was curved in the front like Santa’s sleigh. His gray beard that went with his rough old gray jacket and a warm old sheepskin- lined hat that came down over his ears. He drove the sleigh through the snow with a team of big work horses, Jack and Dolly, to bring back the Christmas tree. It was quite a picture against the snowy landscape right out of Currier and Ives. I looked out the window to see them coming up the drive-way breathing clouds of white breath which trailed across their black manes and mingled with the steam rising from their thick winter coats.
“Whoa Jack, Whoa Dolly,” he called out in a deep gruff voice. They pulled up, tossing their heads with a pffffff” and a whinny, pawing the ground with their big hoofs with lovely silky hair flying around their ankles. Grampa would reach a gnarled hand into his jacket pocket and pull out a lump of sugar for each horse as a special Christmas treat. They snuffled it up gratefully rolling their big black eyes for more.
(Years later I pulled that harness of bells out of the top of the closet and jingled them for my own children who shrieked, “Krandy Kraws!” as they ran to the window to see Santa’s sleigh swirling up into the sky).
On Christmas Eve we gathered in front of a crackling fire in the living room. Edee would bring out the large brown and gold volume of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems and read “Snow Bound”. We loved hearing Whittier’s picture of his large Quaker family which so much resembled our own. As we heard the descriptions of each member we visualized our family members he so accurately delineated.
“Next, the dear aunt, whose smile of cheer
And voice in dreams I see and hear–
The sweetest woman ever Fate
Perverse denied a household mate.”
As she read we admired the tree which rose to the ceiling behind her. Our thoughts swirled around the tiny angels and sparkling Jack Frost which dangled on the tree. But before we went to bed we set out a cup of cocoa and a star sugar cookie by the rocking chair for you know who!
MY NEW OLD FAMILY
When I was four and a half my father returned from China. He frightened me at first because he was so tall, being of NorweigenNorwegian, heritage. He was over six feet and definitely a no-nonsense guy. He bribed me with ice cream cones to be “good.” He was always taking pictures with his camera, so instead of looking into his eyes, I saw a camera lens. This made me feel distanced by the lack of real cont
act. It was hard for me to relate to him as a real person. He also had a deep booming voice, which I found scary. Now we lived together again as a family: my parents, my brother Paul, my sister Eme and me. I confess I never really felt a sense of belonging to that family. My family was Edee and Charlsie in New Hampshire. And so I returned there every summer to be with them even after we moved away.
First, we lived in New Haven, Connecticut, while my father did his dissertation for Yale Divinity School. Every day he drove me to kindergarten on the handlebars of his bicycle. We lived in a monstrous old Victorian house that had a circular front staircase and a creepy back stairway. It was the perfect setting for acting out stories. Rapunzel was my favorite. I stood at the top of the stairs and. made my sister call out from below, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel down your hair that I may climb without a stair.” I dropped a long stocking down the stairwell for my braid. Sometimes I would dance in the living-room. Then my father wanted me to dance for guests when he showed slides illustrating the Twenty-third Psalm. I felt self conscious and would run and hide behind the couch.
My brother Paul was in Boy Scouts. Once he made me catch frogs for him. We went to a park and he pointed to the sky and said, “See those birds? They have long pointy beaks. They are going to drop down and pierce your scull with their beak and suck out your brains.” I cried and cried and ran home to tell Mother.
As Halloween approached my mother brought home pumpkins for us to make Jack-o-lanterns. I loved carving a scary face in mine and then I lit the candle inside. As I was peering down at it to get a better look, my brother pushed my head down so my hair caught on fire. I screamed at the pain. My mother rushed in and threw a towel at my head. My hair was ruined. My mother decided to cut bangs to make me look good enough at least to return to kindergarten, even though my hair was singed.
When I was six we moved to Auburndale, Massachusetts. I attended first grade at the Worthington Hooker School. I had a best friend”, Johnny Robinson. His father was a missionary doctor who had stayed on in China, like my father did. His mother was a nurse. We played “Doctor” in the private room that connected our two houses. We played with the Cochoran twins, Bobby and Jimmy, across the street. Once the twins decided we would play Joan of Arc. They tied me to a tree and just as they had struck the match little sister, Annie got scared and ran for help.
BACK TO CHINA
By age seven we moved to Newtonville. My best friend in second grade was Katherine, Janet O’Connell. She had flaming red hair and was tons of fun I thought. She told me that at her church the nuns would come forward with burning matches and dig them under your fingernails. I thought our adventures would go on forever, but alas, a letter came in the summer when I was on the Farm. “We are going back to China.” It said. You can’t imagine what a horror that was for me, to be parted by such a distance from not only Janet, my best friend, but Edee and Charlsie. On top of that I had been teased at school for being Chinese. The kids would chant:
“Chink chink China man sitting on a fence.
Couldn’t make a dollar out of fifteen cents.”
THE MARINE LYNX
We traveled on an all-night sleeper across the United States. Looking out the window I saw Kansas rolling by, the Rocky Mountains, the plains and deserts. I suppose I should have been thrilled to have this opportunity but I just felt sad and wondered if I would ever see Edee and Charlsie again.
We waited for our passage to be cleared to cross the Pacific in 1949. Finally it came and we sailed on the SS Marine Lynx, a marine transport ship, the only ship available. We were like the Puritans crossing the Atlantic in 1530 in rough seas and cramped quarters: thin uncomfortable bunk beds stacked on top of each other. A group of nuns traveled in our section. It was interesting to see what they wore under their habits. It was hard to figure out, it looked like they wore unbleached simple shifts, one on top of the other so that they looked like wraiths in tatters dangling eerily from the upper bunks.
Traveling westward we lost the best day of the year, Christmas, crossing the international date line. We hit a typhoon and the following morning the decks were strewn with a gray substance like moon rock. Flying fish with iridescent fin like wings twirled and made the deck look like it had been hit by an invasion from outer space.
At last we arrived at Shanghai. What chaos! Shouting coolies rushing onto the ship to grab our trunks to unload. I stayed close to my parents so as not to get swept into the churning crowd of coolies and strangers. We stayed in the luxurious apartment of Bill Bishop, the head of Shanghai YMCA. Little did I know this was the last decent food we would have for a long, long time. After a week of recovery from the crossing we traveled north on a train to Nanjing, the capitol at that time.
NANGING
We were put up by Dr. Ceryl and his wife, Lillieth Bates. He was a professor of Chinese History at the University of Nanging, where my father was also employed making educational films for Yale in China. He was tall with a caved in chest, maybe because he had suffered from TB and had a remote way of talking with a ghastly pulmonary whistle in his voice which sounded more like a gasp. He always looked down at me through heavy spectacles as though I was a rare species of insect. They tucked us away in their freezing attic with a smoking kerosene stove as our only heat. One saving grace was their heavenly gardenia bushes on either side of the stone entrance to the dingy prewar house, somewhat in need of repair. In the summer these gardenia exuded the most divine fragrant perfume from their waxy white blossoms. Around the perimeter of the garden was a high wall. Jagged broken glass stuck straight up on the top of the wall to discourage burglars from climbing over. At this time, right after the war, people were starving and would do anything for a little food or a bicycle, or a chicken. I wish they had stolen all our big brown cans of UNRRA surplus which was the staple of our diet. This was dehydrated food that had been sent to feed the troops in the Philippines and other places in the Pacific during World War II. It was absolutely tasteless and bore no resemblance in any way to real food. But that was all we had.. I remember the biggest treat we had. After dinner one time Lillieth brought out an UNRRA surplus tropical chocolate bar. Designed not to melt in the tropics, in frigid Nanging it was hard as a rock. All we could do was chip away at it and taste the chocolate shavings. Some treat.
Then we moved into our very own house, almost. It was the other half of a duplex shared by a Chinese family from the University, at 10 Ping Ziang Shan. My mother was ecstatic because it was across the street from the former home of Pearl S. Buck, author of “The Good Earth”. Pearl Buck had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
,though it I loved to hear the vendors calling out their wares on the streets: “My shao-bing-uteou -eh”. Coolies carried their wares around balanced on the ends of their dangs. My favorite was the candy man. He was more like a glass blower. He would dip a pipette into some hot gooey stuff in a charcoal brazier in one of the boxes that hung from his pole. Then he placed the other end in his mouth and then he would blow. Out would come the most amazing shape, a rooster or a dragon or a water-buffalo. I couldn’t resist and pointed to a beautiful crimson dragon he had just blown. I paid him and then bit into it…Wooooow! Garlic! He must have been eating garlic before he blew this one. I took another one home and stuck it on head of my bed frame to decorate my bedroom. I was careful not to bite into it.
THE SECRET OF SILK
In the spring my mother said she had a surprise for me.
“Go look in the top drawer of your bureau” she said. I couldn’t wait to find out what it was. I rushed upstairs and opened my bureau drawer. There was a plain white card with black dots on it. How disappointing. I looked again. The dots were tiny seeds.
“They are eggs…from a silk worm moth” she said. “If you keep them warm they will hatch. Do you know the story of silk? how it was the most precious thing the Chinese had. They didn’t want anyone else to discover the secret”
“Tell me, tell me,” I
said.
First I discovered how to take care of silk worms. The tiny seeds soon morphed into small ugly crawling caterpillars. They were ravenous and never stopped munching mulberry leaves. In factories where silk is made, a roomful of munching worms sounds like heavy rain falling on a roof. We had a mulberry tree in our garden from which I used to tear leaves until there were almost none left. After about a month of gobbling mulberry leaves the silk worms disappeared into tiny hairy white cocoons.
“That’s where the silk is, she said, and now I will tell you the five thousand-year old story of silk.”
Princess E-hwa, which means beautiful flower was the most beautiful princess of all. She had long silky black hair that fell straight down to her waist. Her ladies-in-waiting twisted it into a long braid and then wound it around her head. Although she was very tiny, when her hair was done up this way she was at least another foot taller. She had shiny, jet-black eyes and was always laughing so her eyes looked like small slits over her beautiful high cheekbones, which were the color of peaches. They even smelled like peaches.
Princess E-hwa was so beautiful, and such a gracious, clever person, that princes from far and wide came to the court at Chang An to ask for her hand in marriage. But she was always so busy in her garden tending the mulberry trees and playing her lute that she never wanted to leave that sacred place.
One morning after breakfast, (she ate a soft white pork bun and tea) she walked through the garden. She spied the tiniest worm munching on a leaf of one of her mulberry trees.
