Lambsquarters (19 page)

ONE YEAR,
some cattle grazing the long acre (that stretch of roadside owned by the township) found their way up my lane to devour my corn crop. Beautiful heads of golden bantam, peaches and cream, sunny vee, just reaching maturity, silk forming but not bronzed, outer
leaves stretching with the fecundity of their growth. Only days away from the table, from salt and butter and that melting burst of golden sugar in the mouth, sinful vegetable—an oxymoron, for how could a vegetable be evil?—and eaten in the hands, with blessings. Always I set the water to boil first, then harvest the husk straight into the ram’s mouth, skein the silk from the cob and steam it. Right from the garden to the plate.

But not that year. What the cattle didn’t eat before I tore out after them screaming and waving my hands like an ancient harridan, they trampled, mauled and manured. The whole crop was in ruin. Sixty days of growing for naught. Worse than naught, for my neighbour (whose fence had given, whose pasture had not) arrived with a lumpy bag of tough wooden cobs the colour of rancid butter, the taste of Jerusalem artichokes. Sinless vegetables, to be overcooked and eaten after a dour grace.

WINTER FEASTS
begin at Thanksgiving when our board groans with the weight of the season’s growth. Roast lamb with mint sauce, garden potatoes, carrots, squash, beans. Pumpkin pies, and apple pies made with our Spies or York Imperials. Cream from the neighbour (his cows now under control), so thick it needs a spoon to coax it from the jar. Almost everything grown at home. Nothing from farther than down the line, where some years I buy a free-range hen.

As a child I cut turkeys out of brown construction paper, added feathers of purple and red and blue, drew orange crayon legs and smiles with lips. I’d never actually seen a live turkey. We made paper cornucopias with exotic fruit—bananas, lemons, pomegranates, things we could not possibly have grown, as far as we were from the earth in that city school. Thanksgiving was a time of harvest hymns and white damask, bitter turnips and giblet gravy swimming in silver boats, grandparents sitting under engravings of their ancestors hanging on dining-room walls papered in silver and gold medallions.

My corpulent grandfather, in a three-piece brown suit, sweated with angina after too many Crown Royals; my grandmother, thin and stooped in her green dress which zipped up the back, her jewellery glittering, would be a little tipsy from her old-fashioned (after slipping me the cherry) and would laugh just a little too late at jokes she never got. We would sit decorously around the table, which I still use, and give thanks for food someone else grew elsewhere. In the worst years the gravy was made not only with giblets but with the water from the bitter turnips, which ruined, for me, the taste of everything on the plate.

I’ve scraped off the table’s thick varnish and mahogany stain to reveal the oak—it’s a table gone back to its roots. What stories it could tell of my family’s feasts over the last century and a half. Now undamasked and laden with bounty grown within its view. No paper
cornucopias but real vegetables nestled on real straw from the field, placed with care by my children, who share in the harvest. Potatoes: Yukon golds, Kennebecs and Red Chieftains. Gourds from the compost pile, sprigs of grain, baby corn cobs and small squash.

Each year a different harvest is celebrated. One season it was pumpkins. Seventy-two pumpkins filled the garden in a fertility blitz, and we made pies with their frozen flesh for years. One summer we had an abundance of potatoes, nine bushels. We stored mounds and mounds of the earth apples in the root cellar, with many left over for the next spring’s planting. This year we have plums as thick on the branches as pearls on a string. Damsons burnished purple, tightly formed, ovular, luscious, a meretricious display gathered for conserves and jams. Fortune-telling from stewed pits rimming winter plates: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor …

Lonely days of dark skies and damp air in November bring steaming pots of minestrone. Tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, zucchini, beans (green and dried), celery, parsley and my own pesto, made with summer basil, all simmer in the stock from a tough old hen. Our bones are made even warmer by our close connection with this food, food planted and weeded and tended. Food shaped by my own hands and the smaller hands of my daughter and the smaller ones still of my son. Soup sopped with fresh bread, which
was punched and pulled as dough, flavoured with local honey or berries, and risen in the warmth of burning deadfall in the stove. Then formed into loaves, braids or crowns, or even animal shapes like turtles with raisin eyes and salamanders, by the kids.

THERE ARE FEASTS
of pleasure and of strife. One Easter there were fireworks between courses: one guest ran to the barn in tears, too much wine, too many harsh words, and when I returned from comforting her I saw the cloud of dust raised by another couple, departing in a hurry, in a flurry, in a flight that dissolved their marriage. At the table sat my beloved, calmly serving dessert to all the children; hers, theirs, ours. Lives inextricably changed from that moment. Cousins pulled apart, parents splitting, sisters separating. Families reconfiguring as quickly as table settings, with different placemats or sets of china, or silverware. Bits of cracked crockery replaced by patterns not quite the same. Tarnished platters, the silver worn off in places, the copper showing through. Chipped crystal and mismatched glasses.

The table, which had been pulled out to a great length, became small for a time. With the leaves parked in the closet, the table ends were tightly joined into a circle. We had tiny feasts with worried guests on divorce diets. Intimate darkened discussions over modest fare: eggs, scrambled and souffléd, shirred and poached,
frittataed and baked. On the saddest days, soft-boiled, with toast fingers for comfort. Farm food laid in a warm barn to nourish unhappy souls attracted here by the land itself, drawn away from the city lights and cafés by some force.

SPRING BRINGS
the beginnings of hope. The first sprinkle of chives on an omelette. Asparagus. Rhubarb. Food becomes more tantalizing as it grows up around us until the summer bursts with produce, and we move back outside for cookouts, and ice cream frozen with berries from the hedgerows, there for the picking. Fresh corn dripping butter, and dogs parked at a safe distance, dripping desire. Fireflies and stars appearing late in the evening are worth braving the feasting mosquitoes. The mosquitoes’ life cycle: from swamp to us to swamp. The farm’s life cycle: from spring through winter to spring. Our life cycle: from child-free to parents—of newborns through youth—from peace through trauma to planting to harvest. And all over again. And again.

FOX

SUMMER ON THE FARM
makes us lazy and it makes us diligent. The humid heat forces a slow pace yet urges wild growth and lush gardens, pastures and crops. The days are long and light. They begin early with the hoe and end late with the hose, which fills troughs for grazing animals, and baths for parched birds. And in between lie all the tasks of putting up and putting down, from planting in spring to constant harvest in summer as radishes sprout and lettuce ripens, as the first potatoes form on stringy subterranean stems, and early basil starts to shine.

Repairs seem to top the list for every facet of the farm, from machinery to windows, paint to putty, gates to rooftops. Fences bulge and bind, or give way to the constant worry of the flock and beg for wire, plier and twist.

It can be difficult to work in summer—too hot, or wet and storming, dangerous with lightning or sodden in mud. Steamy days when everything ripens and I can’t
budge myself from the shade or the shelter of the house, its thick walls keeping cool around me.

Children’s tempers flare. They forget to share. They badger or beg to be taken to the lake, and my work must wait as we pack up and go. I watch with one eye and read with the other as they splash and swim, wear themselves out and abuse me for staying ashore, out of the marl and muck they roll in like puppies.

The summer of 1990 began with a tense sticky heat. It agitated the sheep; the ewes bleated continuously for different pasture, and the rams turned cocky and belligerent.

Late on one of those humid nights when the only movement through the window is the springing crash of June bugs against the screen, my friend Malka called. Since the day I’d followed her home years ago we had become close friends. She handspun gifts for my babies, had drawn my portrait. We gardened together. But never before had she called in the middle of the night. Her husband, her partner, the love of her life, had been driving home from the tavern when he misjudged his distance, crashed into a tractor and died.

In the week that followed, thunderstorms alternated with surreal skies of ochre light; carmine sunsets warred with cobalt clouds, and the air crackled with static. All the clocks in Malka’s house flashed 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 in a neon vermilion glare as the power bounced in and out with the lightning.

Days passed with baskets of fruit and bouquets of
roses and squares and muffins and cakes and casseroles that arrived in armies, like ants on the move. A widow now, Malka ate none of it. She was quiet and alone. A space that everyone silently respected formed around her kitchen chair. People continued to arrive. They set up camp, cooler bars in the trunks of cars. Hot tempers stamped mooselike down the lane. The inevitable senseless lures of “if onlies” and “what ifs.”

Everything came to a stop. The calendar in Malka’s kitchen, those clocks. The harvest, the planting and thinning and weeding. The thought that we would live forever. That he would.

There was no body to view, no visitation, no funeral. Just a continuous wake moving from his home farm to the neighbour’s, to the tavern in Murphy’s Mill to the Alderney store. His life is immortalized by the beautiful paintings he left behind, by the memories of those who knew him well or not. My children learned about death then. Real death, of someone they knew, who was familiar and not old. How I wanted not to tell them and draw them from their innocence. The summer slipped by in a cloud.

Then the grass grew too long and had to be cut, the compost festered in the pail. Time began to move again and everyone carried on with their lives. We returned to the tasks of the season, bounty gathering like booty, needing attention. July was gone. Sand through a sieve.

IT IS DIFFICULT
to harvest second-cut hay. Even without a shadow over your life. The first cut, full of thin grasses and brought in during the initial heat of summer when everything is promise and future, gets baked early in the day by a hot sun that creeps with rosy fingers over the horizon almost before night has settled in. June days shine longest and brightest; with luck they resist rain long enough for us to harvest the whole crop.

But second-cut is different. The next growth of grasses dwindles and dawdles, playing around on the ground with the worms and bugs. The legumes, however, those meaty masses of clover or alfalfa or bird’s-foot trefoil, relish spreading themselves like a verdant jungle over the field, pushing their way through the cut stubs of weeds, holding each other’s fronds, romancing, waving in swirling patterns with the wind. They grow luscious and thick; they hold the water and the dew. And by August the dew is substantial. It outlines intricate spiderwebs on bushes and fence wires. It lays on the ground until noon or later.