Grandmother's wedding cake

There are periods in our lives when everything happens at once. I see this often among the young families in my neighborhood: they move into a new home, get a new job, have a new baby – all within the space of three or four months.

At age 51, it’s my turn.

I am moving, marrying, renovating a new home and juggling new work. I could be – and sometimes do – feel uprooted with all this change. But my roots, it turns out, run deep.

About three months ago I was surrounded by boxes in the attic, moving out. Time was precious, so I was determined not to give in to nostalgia. For the most part I resisted leafing through old yearbooks and mementos, but on top of one box was a photo album that looked new. Should I set it aside? Or put it with the other photos?

I opened it up. Just to see what was in it.

Out slipped a note from my oldest sister, written nearly 10 years ago on Christmas stationery. Just one page of the album was finished – the note suggested the possibility of filling in the rest over the years.

That one page was enough.

In the center was what appeared to be a wedding invitation: formal, printed script on creamy white stock. But instead of requesting “the honor of your presence…” it described the wedding cake made by my grandmother, Clara Dodd (Myers). Surrounding this was a vintage photograph of her, along with photos of her mother, and her mother’s mother. The script explained that each of them had baked this cake for their weddings, part of a tradition that went back through six generations of women. Under the photos and story were two food-stained index cards recording, in spidery handwriting, the actual recipe. A pint of molasses. A pound of flour.

Apparently, it was my turn.

The cake is a fruitcake, which was traditional for weddings in the 19^th century –this may have been because there was no baking soda then, and with no refrigeration the whisky-soaked cake kept well on a shelf.  Clara Dodd’s mother, Anne Sniffen (Dodd) was born in 1868, and her great great grandmother, who is the first listed as having made the cake, would have lived four generations before, which must have been in the 1700s.

This is a different breed of cake from the brick-hard, brick-heavy holiday punchline. It is rich and moist,  sunny with raisins and sweet with warm, earthy flavor. How do I know?

My daughter, my own Clara Dodd, named for her great grandmother, made it for my wedding.

Clara Dodd Myers, raised five sons and lost one daughter, who was three when she succumbed to one of those diseases now easily cured (was it pneumonia? Whooping cough?). Her husband was a stern patriarch who insisted his boys wear neckties to the dinner table. She must have been the softer of the two parents – her boys, and eventually, their children, called her “Mothe,” short for “Mother” (and pronounced like the first part of that word).

In fact, Mothe did not like her given name, Clara Blanche. She was a tomboy, I’m told, and was called “Bill.” Despite  that fact (and after confirming with my father that my late grandmother would not object), I named my only daughter for her. He nicknamed her “Billy Dodd.”

Mothe was just 5 feet tall, but from the stories I’ve heard, she was a pistol. When her children were still  small, she took a bus across the country, by herself, to visit her brother in the San Juan Islands, writing postcards about her travels and sending her love back to her family in Sea Cliff, on the north shore of Long Island. One story recounts her girlish delight when (and I picture her here as a young bride), she’d purchased a dress and twirled around in it for her husband. He sternly told her to return it to the store, as they couldn’t afford this extravagance. During World War II, she dug up a victory garden in the hard-packed dirt of her back yard; she lived with her mother, her husband and five sons in an old Victorian house with a coal-burning stove in the basement, leaving the bedroom windows open in winter for the fresh air. In summer she trooped the boys down to the beach at Hempstead Harbor, where her youngest would splash within the safety of a playpen, set at the water’s edge with its bottom removed.

My own memories of Mothe are limited: She had a little white dog named Skid Row,  a front porch swing that bumped into the wall of the living room behind it, a gravel driveway that always signaled the end of our family’s long drive to her house. She used a gourd to darn socks, always had a knitting basket nearby, and drank gin and ginger ale with ice cubes that tinkled in her glass.

I was just 5 years old when we sat around the dining room table and my father told us Mothe had died. He gave each of his four daughters a piece of her jewelry. I wore the little clasp bracelet on my wedding day.

And, I also ate her wedding cake. Thank you, sister Jean, for sharing this family history. Thank you my own sweet Clara Dodd, for baking the cake, and carrying it into the seventh generation – I will make it eight at your wedding some day! And thank you, Mothe, for joining us in the celebration, and reminding me: even in the midst of change, I am rooted in tradition. 

Transformation

I have changed professions.

This week, I am a contractor. And a mover.
All this because yes, I am moving – just across the street, but it is a big deal just the same. The accumulation of years, etc. etc.
So, I am filling boxes with all sorts of things – CDs, books, photo albums, pillows, clothes. And I am moving those boxes, muscling them down two flights of stairs, shoving them around the back of the van or maneuvering them onto a hand truck and then unloading them elsewhere. During the hottest week of the year.

I am also tidying up the house I am leaving, for the next resident – which is where the contractor part comes in. I am painting a soothing “Swiss Coffee” color over the purple and lime green in my son’s room (bittersweet, but transformational). I am recaulking the tub where it had gotten grody. I am replacing drip pans under stove burners, and cleaning out the contacts so the one burner that wouldn’t light will work again. I am trimming hedges, untangling vines from the azalea, mowing the lawn, hauling brush to the curb.

I am sweaty. I wear paint-splattered shorts and dirty t-shirts, and when I am clearing thorn-studded brush I am wearing my father’s old pants, also paint-splattered, and recently mended where they split at the crotch.
This work is liberating. I feel as though I’ve dropped all pretense – and I didn’t think I had much to begin with. But I do like to think of myself as pulled together when I go out in public.
Not this week.
I go to the hardware store in the clothes I am wearing – which are typically the clothes I wore the day before. My shirt is inside out, to protect it from paint. And it is damp with the heat. I am dirty, smear of soil on my knee where I went out to pick tomatoes at lunch time, hair covered by a hat, or pulled back with a strip of fabric I tore from an old t-shirt that was waiting to be used as a rag. I run into people I know, and they don’t even notice – or at least they are too polite to say anything. It’s still me. Maybe that pulled together look isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
My eating habits have changed, too. I am hungry all the time but I don’t have time to stop and eat. Also, the house is bare bones, so I heat up whatever is not freezer-burned if I get hungry. Edamame. Raisin bread that’s been frozen for a year. Between that and the heat, I’ve lost seven pounds.
And I feel strong. Wiry. I look in the mirror, and I see my dad, a guy who was always outside trimming fruit trees or mowing the hay field or fertilizing the lawn, sweating and skinny in the Florida heat. I think of him when I pick up his old screwdriver to fasten a light switch plate, or when I’m cutting in painting trim, trying to make it look right – Dad was a perfectionist and, it turns out, I’ve inherited a bit of that myself. The “holidays” where wall paint makes an unintended spot appearance on the ceiling, must be fixed. The gutters must be replaced all around, not just in the spot where the oak limb fell last year.
The place is going to look great. It is being transformed.
And so am I.

Church of the Blessed Farmers Market

  Every farmer’s market has its day.
  In Takoma Park, Sunday market is a landmark, if a weekly event can be a landmark. It’s where everyone goes to run into one another, catch up on the news of the week, and incidentally buy apples and peaches and strawberries, depending on the season – sort of like church, but vegetables and fruit replace the prayers.
  Certainly the food is worthy of reverence. This market has the best selection of greens I’ve ever seen: collards, mustard, spinach, kale, bok choi, chard. There’s an entire town block dedicated to locally grown, mostly organic vegetables and herbs, sustainably raised bison, artisanal goat cheese, my favorite scones, big, fat empanadas, and eggs that go for $5 a dozen. Yes, some of it’s on the pricey side, but we are paying the farmers directly, talking to them about how this year’s crop of spinach has been and when we should all plant broccoli. It’s the sort of place where the farmers write memoirs (this Sunday, Forrest Pritchard from Smith Meadows Farm, will be signing his). And it’s where you’ll see your neighbors not only purchasing produce, but also pitching in behind the “counter,” working part-time as clerks for the farmers. I faithfully buy apples and peaches from Twin Springs FruitFarm, where my then-teenage son worked for several summers in a row, and the regulars there often ask for updates on his travels.
  Plus, there’s live music: the teenage fiddle player (I remember her from my daughter’s gymnastics classes) and the Banjo Man, with his crowds of young children chiming in on Oh Susanna.
  On Wednesdays – when many churches schedule evening mass – I can replenish the produce drawer at the Crossroads Market, where there is an entirely different congregation. For one thing, many of the patrons and vendors speak Spanish, so I get to trot out my rudimentary español: “dos pepinos, por favor, y un cantalupo pequeño.” In fact, with the smell of fresh pupusas sizzling on the griddle and the produce labels written in both Spanish and English, I can imagine that I am visiting some bustling town in Central America. The market has also gained a pioneering reputation for the first Fresh Checks program in the country: It allows families participating in federal food assistance programs like WIC and SNAP to use their benefits to purchase locally grown produce at discount prices.
   I also love the African griot/musician, who shows up from time to time to play his ngoni, a sort of skinny guitar  from Mali. Plus, there are Sno-Kones!
  But no rhubarb. For that, there is a Saturday farm stand that just opened this year on Maple Avenue. Called MarVa Harvest, it’s located right in the middle of a corridor of high-rise apartment buildings, just a couple of white tents erected in a parking lot to shade tables of produce grown primarily on one local farm. This market has a mission, which its prices reflect: to provide lower cost, sustainably grown food to everyone, regardless of income.
  The first time I visited, I saw the rhubarb I’d been looking for – it has such a short season, and I hadn’t seen it available anywhere else. The folks who run this market are polite enough to keep their thoughts to themselves, but I’m sure they were puzzled by my over-reaction when, halfway across the parking lot, I was already exclaiming, "Wow, rhubarb!" I was so excited to see it, I bought extra so I could freeze some for later. And I made one of the best strawberry rhubarb pies ever – my favorite, next to cherry. And mixed berry. And that lemon slice pie I want to try next.  
  Like farmers markets, pie has endless varieties. I love them all. Any day of the week.

Art for fun

Art Hop:
Excuse for artists and friends to roam around town for two days and look at each other’s work.
Opportunity to participate in no-pressure pop-ins, to see art you don’t have to buy (but can), then move on.
Showcase for Takoma Park’s artsy fartsy-ness, saturating everything from the hardware store to the toy shop.
All of the above.

And, this year, there’s an infusion of new talent. I’ll  not only get to rub elbows with the uber hipsters (and friends) who have anchored this town’s art scene for decades, I get to hang with some younger talent as well. Like Martin Swift.

He is seriously talented.

Full disclosure: he calls me Mom (as in, he visits my own kids enough to feel like a part of the family), so yeah, I would say he’s talented. But also, it’s true. This is not your average, just-out-of-college kid dipping his toes in the water and showing his “art” at non-juried, come-one-come-all shows. This is serious stuff, and this is a bold guy, unafraid of putting his (very distinctive) work out there on its own merit – not because it fits a particular genre or market, but because it’s who he is and what he has to say. Plus, it’s selling.

You’ll just have to see it for yourself, at Trohv, during Art Hop.

Which, even without Martin, is one awesome event. I mean really, what other city of 17,000 has the collection of talent we have? Sure, some of it is whimsical and crafty, but I would dare to say (since I’m not an art critic, but cleave to the old trope, “I know what I like”) much of it is high-end whimsical. You will not find plastic beads strung on earring wires. But there will be handmade beads, glass-fired beads, and an enthusiastic explanation of how they were made from an artist standing yes, right there, hoping you might dish out $30 for a pair of earrings. And even if you can’t really afford to, you probably will. Plus, there are other artists who have not quit their day jobs; their price tags are lower. And. You don’t have to buy anything. You can just come and enjoy the art, right where it is, and feel enriched because you live in this place where artists thrive.

The vibe here is open and unpretentious, the artists mostly have fun visiting with friends and each other, and if there are art patrons, you wouldn’t be able to tell them from the rest of the crowd. It’s basically a party, that happens to have art as a running theme.

The official Art Hop spiel goes like this: more than 60 emerging and established artists, variety of media (painting, textiles, photography, collage, hand-crafted jewelry), in shops, galleries and restaurants all around town. So, you’ll see collage at the hair studio and sculpture at the florist.  Saturday and Sunday, April 13 and 14 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Plus, there’s a kick-off tonight, Friday the 12^th from 6 to 8 at Trohv. Martin will be there.

And so will I.

The photo: Artist Bobbi Kittner, who helped found Art Hop, Bulent Ceylon who runs the shop, Covered Market, and John McQuillan, who runs Salon Jam hair studio. Photo by Sam Kittner

Warmth of community

Yesterday, one of the first warm days of spring, there were signs of the season everywhere in Sligo Creek Park. Brilliant yellow flowers carpeting the banks of the creek. Mallards paired up in the water. And my favorite, a pair of socks had been left behind, spread out on a rock where a boy must have liberated his toes and switched to barefoot for the summer.

On these gloriously warm days, people come out again. It is as if we are sparkling water, bottled up all winter long, until we unscrew our caps and the effervescence of our lives explodes.  There are more runners. More bikers. More gardeners and dog walkers and grillers.

And we talk more. We want to catch up with our neighbors.

I’ve found the perfect spot for this: at the new gelato store, kitty korner from the town clock. At about 5:00, the commuters begin walking home from Metro, and the young mamas are still out with their strollers. The merchants are around, too. Everyone is out, eating gelato, or drinking coffee, or popping into the hardware store, greeting one another, lightened by the warm weather and each other.

Yesterday I caught up with Dave, who I haven’t seen in six years. And Jane, who lives just down the street but with whom I haven’t shared a conversation in months. We sat in the sun and greeted people going by and chatted about our kids and our work and the new businesses in town.

Even strangers greet one another. Back in the park, one of the dog-walking regulars – an older guy with white stubble and two labs, one black and one white – leaned over the fence at the playground and called out, “How’s the new slide?” The young mama answered over her baby’s wailing, “We’re about to find out!” and looked up to find her toddler negotiating the top of the slide.

I have an old card posted on my refrigerator: “How to Build Community.” It’s a vintage sentiment but it still rings true. It is the unwritten code of Takoma Park.

Leave your house. Know your neighbors. Greet people. Sit on your stoop. Plant flowers. Share what you have. Help a lost dog. Take children to the park. Have potlucks.

 I am going to a potluck now. At my neighbor’s house. I will probably visit with another neighbor on the way.

And it’s not just because it’s spring – but that helps.

 

The photo is Marcello Minna, the very friendly Italian who runs our new gelato shop, Dolci Gelati. Building community.

Agricultural revolution

On a recent morning, as I walked my dog around the block, she lunged at something just out of my sight, on the other side of a neighbor’s car. Probably a cat, I thought.

No. A chicken.

Two chickens, in fact.

And I live in Takoma Park, a Washington, D.C. suburb within walking distance of a subway stop into the city.

The chickens did their high-stepping waddle around the back of the car, scolding the dog in their gentle clucking voices as they went. The dog, utterly confused, and, thank goodness, on a leash, alternately lunged and backed off. 

I know these chickens. They belong to a friend who lives across the street from where they were pecking at the neighbor’s lawn. They are out during the day, but mostly stay close to the coop and are gathered in at night. I thought of knocking on the door to let my friends know “the girls” had wandered across the street, but then they started to cross on their own. In front of a car.

Oh, no! I put out a mittened hand to alert the driver, who stopped to let the birds cross.

At this point I was laughing at these busybody hens bustling themselves home after their morning adventure, oblivious to automobile traffic and focused only on the patch of ground in front of them. The driver, unbelievably, was not amused, and acted as though she was waiting for a child to cross the street, nothing unusual about two chickens in her path. She continued her conversation on the cell phone and never made eye contact with me, or the chickens. 

I chuckled all the way home.

Then I toasted some cornbread for breakfast and slathered it with honey from the hives of another neighbor, across the street.

Who says you have to live on a farm to have the best of everything? 

 

A whelk to remember

New York Times, food section article: Elaborate photos of a little seashell-encased delicacy served beside a ramekin of unnaturally bright green parsley and garlic butter, with a glass of white wine in the soft-focus background. International overtones: the Italians call them scungilli, the English have popularized them as whelks – along with talk of executive chefs and lists of high-end-sounding restaurants that serve them mixed with “crispy duck tongues,” or dressed with “fenugreek-cashew pesto.”
Really?
These are the same little seashells I picked up on the beach when I was a kid, excited to be gathering up something we’d be eating for dinner that night, far from the linen-covered tables of Manhattan.
As I remember it, the whelk is a humble little critter, in the way a dragonfly is humble: common, in its habitat, but stunningly and intricately beautiful when you take time to really look at it. The whelks I encountered all those years ago were a study in black and white, like a houndstooth tweed whorled around a spiral snail house.

I don’t remember exactly how we ate the whelks – probably steamed until we could ease them out of their shells, and dipped in butter, if we had it. We were living aboard the Glad Tidings, a 40-foot sailboat that was home for a family of five (sorry, Jean, you’d disembarked by this time), and on this particular occasion we were in Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands. One expanse of coastline, called the Baths, is all rock, great for 9-year-old girls like me: I climbed and scrambled and explored, discovering the dips and recesses in the rock where centuries of crashing waves had worn the granite into smooth recesses, now filled with seawater warming in the sun. These still pools were full of tiny fish and shellfish, the sort that are perfect for filling small pockets. And they were full of whelks.

Our guide, Cap’n Tony, a boisterous, dark-bearded sailor and ex-pat we’d met at the dock a few islands back, told us the whelks were edible. Full of 9-year-old purpose, I began to collect them.
I kept one of the shells for years, proud to know the provenance of such a thing – but aside from that keepsake, I’ve never encountered whelks since. Until the New York Times.
In typical fashion – it’s what I love about this publication – the Times is thorough: I read that whelks are closely related to conch, the other Caribbean shellfish we learned to eat on the boat (we would follow their trails in the sand, visible through gin-clear water, then dive down for them). Whelks are usually sold as scungilli, often for Italian pasta sauces, and they are a by-catch (like the rock shrimp and stone crab my dad used to get in his shrimp nets, years later in Florida).
All good information. But the most important thing to remember about whelks, for me: that magical day I spent gathering them from the rocks, under a Caribbean sun.