by Mary Odden
There won’t be time to catch a movie while we are in town and if we did the dog would get cold in the truck, but Costco provides plenty of stimulating intellectual entertainment. My favorite in-store activity is to figure out what strangers do for a living or what their lives are like. You can determine these demographics by looking at the items people are buying. The guy with the flat bed cart full of puppy chow and paper towels obviously runs a kennel. That gal with the stack of five pound bags of coffee and cases of flavorings is a barista, and that couple with the two carts full of hot dogs and buns and brownie mix and soda pop have been employed by their child to host a party at the soccer field. Sometimes I am so sure of my analysis of other people’s lives that I engage them in conversation, only to find out I was wrong.
Years ago, these big box stores weren’t around, so we couldn’t save money by buying in quantity unless we mail-ordered. When stores are far away, a case of toilet paper is a great idea.
Yes, Costco and Sam’s are hard on locally-owned grocery and hardware stores. I think about the economic changes caused by the big stores but selfishly stick with the economics enjoyed by us. We shop seldom; we shop much. We are our own cargo cult.
Mostly, too much of anything is just right, as long as we can keep it in the pantry or the freezer. Some items that last us three years in the refrigerator, like a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, are so unique and precious to a foody like me that I just smile at them every time I am in their aisle, reassuring myself they will be there if I ever use up the six jars I already own.
It took a while to calibrate our bulk buying so that we run out of pickle relish and toilet paper and dog food at about the same time, consolidating our trips to town, but after a couple of decades we almost have it down.
RHUBARB
The first rhubarb plants at our Nelchina house probably went into the ground in the 1970s. When we came along in 1983 they were a reminder that I never really learned how to garden in eastern Oregon.
Oh yeah, there was that summer when I was about ten that I planted the entire garden with a wildly prolific crop of acorn squash that strangled all the other plants. Those shiny dark green pleated globes made me so proud—though I suspect their care and subsequent distribution fell heavily on my mother, already plenty busy with the little grocery store she operated with my father.
Rhubarb grew up against farmhouses, churches, and schoolhouses in that arid country, reaching for the scant rain that came off eaves and waterspouts. I remember rhubarb pies and rhubarb sauce in the early summer before peaches and apples came on to claim my mother and aunts’ Sunday attentions.
A few thousand miles north, the little green ruffles bullying their way out of the ground at Nelchina got plenty of rain but nothing else from my husband and me for twenty years. I dug beside them a few times to plant seeds of other kinds of vegetables, all soon choked by grasses and opportunistic little willows during our summers of firefighting and living elsewhere. Our house-sitter beat back the willows for a little garden of his own for a summer or two while the stunted rhubarb plants sat on the sidelines, waiting.
Finally, in my summer life in McGrath, pioneer Margaret Mespelt laughed me into being a gardener with her confidence in the miracle of digging, planting, watering, cultivating and thinning. Between her eightieth and ninetieth birthdays she told me secrets shared by strawberries and potatoes: “Girl, you don’t just throw plants in the ground and forget about them.”
Rhubarb, a gift to northern folks who can’t grow apples, is the crop which comes closest to thriving even if you do forget about it. But at Margaret’s house the rhubarb stood halfway up your thigh with stalks as thick as Husky dog legs.
“It likes water and fertilizer,” she told me, which is why the busy underground factory of rhubarb stalks has to be divided and shared with new gardeners now and again. This is part of the generosity of rhubarb.
When we came back to Nelchina from McGrath to live year-round, equipped with the longing every Alaska gardener feels as the country turns warm and green in May, I was astounded to see those little rhubarb plants still trying to survive.
I had been feeling sad at the loss of my McGrath garden, 400’ in elevation with deep rich soil left by an ancient river that enjoys looping itself around the broad valley like a liquid rope. I peered at the rocky ground of Nelchina, 2500’ above sea level, and I felt Margaret’s words and the confidence of McGrath’s good soil drain out of me.
But there was the rhubarb, miraculously clinging to someone’s lost idea of a garden, and I felt gratitude. I moved the plants to the center of the old cleared space over moderately deep soil I laced with fertilizer and manure. Someone gave me another little clump of rhubarb and I planted it, too. I watered the clumps every day it didn’t rain. I dug compost in around them.
The rhubarb rewarded us by becoming the centerpiece of our new garden, even in its first year in the new location. It bursts out of the ground like a row of green geysers in May, reminding me to get the potato hills started around it and the other seeds into the ground. The rhubarb’s red and green stalks are ready for a first harvest even before the carrot and beet seedlings are ready to thin.
Rhubarb encourages me, like an old friend, to have confidence in the mysterious partnership with green things, again and anywhere.
SQUIRRELING SQUASH
All summer, groping through the chest freezer, I was looking for anything I could fix for supper in a hurry. Whatever it was, was usually on the bottom, and getting to it involved a certain topsy-turvy athleticism. Packages and bundles were thrown every which way.
Likewise the pantry. When the novelty of a green landscape has not yet worn off and the fireweed still has a bunch of buds on top, my main concern with the pantry is that there are granola bars for snacks and several gallons of ketchup to squirt on whatever it was I found in the freezer, usually something to skewer and hang over a fire.
But let one leaf turn yellow and chemical changes in my physiology dial me back to an apparently brain stem function I share with the squirrels. Forget the granola bars and hot dogs—it is time to gather real food.
Edible green and red and orange things are suddenly available in the garden, I’m looking for neighbors to go berry picking with me, and I’m making room in the freezer for a possible large wild animal should we be so lucky. I make time for things I couldn’t even think about in June—such as rendering lard from that big garbage bag of frozen pig fat Marian gave me last spring. Finally, I get around to canning the salmon I initially tossed whole into the freezer in the frenzy of mid-summer.
When our own fresh food is getting ready for harvest and we are craving the bounty of fall, this is the best or worst of times for that van truck to appear at the Hub, loaded with fruits and vegetables from the lower 48. It is riches upon riches. There are gunny sacks of corn, boxes of apples and peaches, and there, on the ground in front of the little stand, is a banana squash.
Banana squash is the most delicious squash in the world. It is a hard fall variety, pale orange and pickle-shaped, with some outstanding specimens of its breed nearing the size of a one-person kayak. In the small eastern Oregon town where I was raised, I remember it sometimes took two church sale auctioneers to lug a giant squash up front to sell: “Who wants to bid on this one?”
It takes a village to eat a big banana squash.
The squash before me at the Hub was just a baby, maybe 30 pounds. We will eat squash until April, but Jim has never really believed in the existence of banana squash so I must buy this squash.
Later, at home, as I am peeling the twenty pounds of peaches I also felt compelled to purchase, I realize I am as happy as I’ve ever been in my life. Having come from a long line of peelers, there is nothing I would rather be doing.
This is not just a “girl thing,” though my mom and dear long-gone aunts are all around me as I peel or can fruit, cut meat or make jelly. I can see their aprons, hear their jokes. My brothers are just like me—crazy to peel a
pples and boil the meat off bones for mincemeat. I think they love to cook and can for the same reasons I do—putting up food is a good way to touch all those missing people we love, and all the times we loved them. Photos are dead, but peaches are right now.
So this isn’t just for the past, either. This is going to feed our families and make new good memories.
Every day now, I see my neighbors out hunting and berry-picking, or buying boxes of this lower-48 harvest so conveniently parked at the junction of the Rich and the Glenn. They are in squirrel mode, too. A little later on, when moose season is over and the berries are too soft and the leaves are gone, I’ll invite them over to eat some squash.
THE GRIM REAPER OF CHRISTMAS
They put up the tree every year, but they won’t take it down. Admittedly its colored lights are lovely on those darkest nights of the year—about 18 hours of every day. But along toward Valentine’s Day the poor thing has lost all its needles or is trying to grow new ones and I can’t stand it anymore.
They are unabashed sentimentalists, my Jim and Kari. They go into the woods together on the snowmachine, pulling a sled, and mentally frame each of the candidates against our big window at home, where cars out on the highway will see the colored lights for miles. Anyone coming home on a trail below the house after dark will be guided by a tree decked with reds and greens and golds and an electric LED blue, the latter delivering serious acupuncture to the dark blue night of winter.
They imagine the tree’s shape in the house, glowing from the floor to the high ceiling, and the fun of the first few nights when we sleep underneath it just for the novelty. They are attached to this tradition of choosing a tree, in which the “right” tree springs out at them and offers its life for our Christmas. And, unfortunately, well beyond.
They trim and fit the trunk into the stand, bring the tree upstairs, bring the ladder from the shop, check the lights to see which ones still work this year.
And this is where it gets unconventional.
Down from the attic come the boxes of things to hang on the tree and some of these don’t have anything to do with Christmas. Admittedly, he and I have spent our lives in stubborn resistance to interior decorating. In our house, a “match” is something that starts a fire. Not for us, those glass bulbs that complement the curtains or bring out the reds in the carpet. Away, ye flocked branches—there is quite enough of the real stuff out of doors. And we gave up tinsel early in our marriage when it constipated the vacuum cleaner, though tinsel does pass with some ceremony through the digestive tracts of Labrador Retrievers.
As I stare through the festive yet neglected branches late in January, I see that the tree is hung with every Christmas gee gaw they could wrap a wire or a thread around, including the usual French horns and wooden drummer boys, but also the tiny grapes and leaves that came with some bottle of wine on some birthday. I will admit to being responsible for the ugly clay images of my loved humans and dogs. I run out of inspiration when we make ornaments with our neighbors and I am likely to stick a curved wire in anything that results from several hours of ingesting coffee and cookies and finding malleable art materials in my hands. There is a clay pizza in the tree. I made some clay coffee bean ornaments one year for barista friends who wondered why I had given them tiny painted turds for their tree.
Christmassy though it may be, the “evil elf” ornament was quite uncalled for—I have never looked like that before or since, and my frowning photo framed by the little wooden fellow in upturned footgear always startles me. I don’t make it disappear, because they are watching me, but I keep moving it to the back of the tree. Sometimes late at night I hear snickering and then in the morning I find it out front in plain view again.
I could, in fact, make several of these “bad” ornaments disappear. I am alone in the house and I have fetched the ladder to take the things down—always my job. The tiny mortis and pestle with the ribbon on it? How is that Christmas? The green and gold ornaments commemorate football season, the season that cradles Christmas just as fans cradle a Packer player leaping into the stands after a touchdown at Lambeau.
But the one with the little creature, is it a chipmunk, perched on the green and gold ball waving a banner and a candy cane? Would they notice if it went the way of the broken glass bulbs? And oops, those are Cousin Eric’s socks, not washed, found in a sleeping bag by the TV after Thanksgiving and put in the tree so that we wouldn’t forget to give them to him at Christmas. Well we did forget, and they don’t smell any better.
There are the magical glasses that turn every Christmas bulb to “Noel” when we look through them at the tree, and beside them my daughter’s Groucho Marx glasses and nose. These are in the tree in case we want to ask each other do we want to buy a duck.
I fold up the Noel glasses, Kiley’s middle name as she reminded us this year, and put them away with the intact glass ornaments. I pluck Groucho out of the Christmas box—we’ll need him before next Christmas, I’m sure. I’ll put him someplace slightly unusual in Kari’s room, so the idea will pop out at her, somewhat like the very realistic black plastic spider we have hidden for years under each other’s pillows or in the toes of slippers. You never know where that thing is going to show up, and it is always good for a screech and a sudden little air space under the victim.
The horse-sock puppet is up there in the tree, too, made when Kari was small and representing my one real chance to develop multiple personalities. He has leather ears, jiggly plastic eyes, and an electric blue yarn forelock. The toe of the sock folds easily into a mouth, when your hand forms a “C” inside it, and his nostrils are two little black plastic hearts. Years ago, Lisa Smayda and I drove our family members mad as we talked to each other through these puppets we made for our children. This puppet has always been more my gig than Kari’s, and he is looking at me now, with a bit of a vacant expression that I have no hand in.
“It was good to find you again this year,” I tell him as I slip my fingers into the wool sock that comprises himself.
He nods, looks wise, squenches up his muzzle like Sheri Lewis’s “Lamb Chop” used to do.
“Are you sure you want to live in the Christmas box,” I ask him.
“You play with me every year,” he/I reply.
“That’s good, then,” I say, reluctant to put him away. He nods an energetic affirmative that engages my entire hand from the wrist, and I reach him up to kiss me on the cheek, sweet reassurance of his continuing regard.
Un-Christmas ornaments now belong on the tree. And once hanging, they are still capable of transformations. As I take it from a branch, a slice of porcelain moon reminds me that I once thought my mother had ruined it, scrawling, “Kari Ruth’s first Christmas, 1989,” across the milky surface with a black felt marker. By now of course, with my untrustworthy memory, this ornament would have been nothing but a lovely piece of glass on a string with something—what?—compelling about it. But the crooked message reminds me, or makes me consider for the first time, what an effort it took at that stage in my mother’s life, when she was already struggling with dementia and loneliness, to find this thing and mark her love upon it, then put it in a box to send to the grandchild whose middle name is hers.
When all the ornaments are in boxes for the attic, I take down the light strings, apologizing to the tree for the sudden lack of cheer.
“There are going to be real birds outside,” I tell it. “We will stand you in the snow next to a feeder and the birds are going to be all over you. The grosbeaks and chickadees are more beautiful than any ornaments and lights.”
We don’t talk about spring and the burn pile. The tree has not read that awful story by Hans Christian Anderson and I am not going to bring it up.
It will stay green for a long time anyway. Such a full tree this year, sending out new sprigs at the end of every branch, not like the spindly Charlie Brown tree they carried up here one year as a joke on me. The tip of it was on her shoulder, the cut base on his, and in between it was
a tall, entirely dead tree, with not even a needle left.
“There,” they giggled, “is your Christmas tree that does not have to be killed.” They could not carry through with the joke long enough to screw it into the stand and start decorating. They were laughing too hard, coughing and spitting. Jim knew he’d actually surprised me, which never happens at Christmas because I wrap all the presents.
They finally had to give up their joke and bring in the real Christmas tree, green and hopeful and of course doomed.
POSTSCRIPT
Three Absent Friends: Sam, Jean, and Pat
Sam Lightwood was the father of our paper. There had been other Copper Basin newspapers, including the Copper River Current in the mid-sixties and the Alaska Bush News that Warren McDaniels published in 1968. Local papers started up again in the 1970s when Sam, along with Lil and Terry Gilmore, Mike Swisher, Cherime Gallatin, Frances Kibble and others started a Kenny Lake Publishing Co-op.
The Copper Valley Views was the product of that group, with Sam Lightwood publishing the Views up until Linda and Jeremy Weld’s Copper River Country Journal took over during the 1990s. When the CRCJ gave it up at the turn of the century, Sam didn’t want the valley to be without a newspaper, so he dutifully started the Copper Valley Views again.
When we came back to the Copper Basin after our years in McGrath I didn’t have a job, so I offered to help Sam with the Views, a bi-weekly then. I ran around the valley writing stories and generally having a wonderful time. Marian had been telling Sam, approaching 80 years old, that he had to let go of either his herd of 40 cows or the newspaper. Jim and I took the newspaper in late 2005 and renamed it. We talked with Sam frequently; one or both of us stopped in at the Lightwood homestead for a cup of tea with Sam and Marian on the days we delivered bundles of papers to the post office and store counters.
