To build a fire

Okay, I am not so desperate as the guy in the Jack London story, fighting sub-zero temperatures on a remote trail while trying to coax flame from a few sticks in the snow. But I do get anxious about making a fire, and this weekend it was more important than building a picture-perfect blaze in the fireplace.

It was cold. There was no central heat. I needed that fire.

We are talking out in the country. And, here’s the thing: I am no master fire builder. Every time I put my match to newspaper, tucked carefully under sticks of kindling and neatly placed pieces of wood, I worry that the ratio of big to small branches is workable, that the newspaper is neither too tightly crumpled nor too loose, and I hope that the fire gods will smile on me and give me heat. Sometimes, they do. Most times, even. But it still comes as a surprise.

Perhaps that’s because I did not grow up making fires. I gathered kindling in the “woods” behind our Long Island home – a vacant lot in a suburban development in Setauket. I approached this very important assignment with the earnest vigor of the good little 7-year-old I was, gathering the driest, best-sized sticks, then twisting pages of newspaper just so to set beneath them and delivering it all to my father, who put it all together and made the actual fire himself.

As a teenager in Florida, I made a small fire in another vacant lot, which I somehow knew was not allowed – just as I knew the cigarettes my friend snuck from her mother’s purse for us to try, lighting them at our tiny stick fire, were forbidden. Later, in North Carolina, my college boyfriend showed me how to light a fire in his woodstove, which I did while he was away and I stayed at his house, taking care of his cats. I felt like a pioneer woman, choosing quick- and hot-burning pine to burn in the wood cookstove, congratulating myself when the water for my tea finally boiled.

I shared my own house in college with two fire building housemates, who dealt with the woodstove themselves. We rented the house, on a mountain road outside Boone, N.C., for $150 a month, total, and it was as drafty as a barn, with gaps in the walls where moonlight and the cold seeped in.  The stove was in the one interior room, and that is where we spent all our time, with the doors to the kitchen, living room and bedrooms closed tight against the weather. At bedtime, we would turn on electric blankets in the bedrooms, wait for them to heat up, then dive under the covers until morning.

We needed fire in that house. Last weekend, same: drafty house, up in the mountains of SW Virginia. Cold grate. No fire.

I know I can do this – I’ve done it before. But I am a junior firebuilder. A junior firebuilder, walking into a cold house at the end of a dark road a mile from any neighbor. Well, less than a mile, but far enough so that it was pitch dark walking between the car and the front door and the only sounds were deer sneaking around in the woods. This was no vacant lot in Florida. It was the first time I’d been on my own there, and I arrived at 8:30, in the dark of one of our first cold autumn nights, with temperatures below 30 degrees outside—and probably inside as well. I kept my hat and coat on.

To start a fire: I checked the flu in the fireplace. I gathered up the very dry kindling and wood I’d brought along, crumpled newspaper just as Daddy taught me, arranged my sticks on top and placed a couple of small logs just so. I struck a match. I used the new trick my honey (and master firebuilder) showed me, and directed the first wisps of smoke up the flu with a lit bit of newspaper held where the fireplace gives way to chimney.

Voila! A face-warming fire in the grate.

Amazing.

I know the woodstove in the next room would have been more efficient. It would eventually warm the whole house, unlike the fire, which burned one side of my legs but left the other side of me, and the rest of the room, cold. Like a camp fire. But I kept my hat on and, for the couple hours before bed, the fireplace was perfect.

I sat contentedly, luxuriating in the fire’s glow, occasionally feeding it another log that I’d warmed on the stone hearth first.

At bedtime, I placed the screen over the fireplace and opened the door to the bedroom.

Where I’d switched on the space heater.

There are lots of ways to build a fire.

Raisins and salt

My dream is to work out in the garden, pushing the edge of dusk, happy to be rearranging the earth and its bounty until it’s too dark to see, while inside my house someone is making dinner. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? Division of labor. You can have both: late hours in the garden, AND homemade dinner.

That’s not the way it works when you are single. Any late gardening means dinner will be late, too – and it will probably be scrambled eggs or grilled cheese or something equally quick and easy. Which is fine – but wow, wouldn’t it be amazing to come in, wash the mud from my hands, and sit down to a real meal that someone else has made? Or how about this: come home from work at the end of a long weekday and have dinner ready? I’m not talking about being met at the door with a martini and my house slippers – just being met at the door by cooking smells and knowing that dinner is already underway.

This happens now.

It is one of the many perks of being (newly) married.

And there are more.

Just today I called my husband (don’t you love the sound of that?!?!) and asked him to pick up raisins and salt. And he will. I don’t have to make a special trip to the co-op, or put it on my list for later, or go without raisins in my oatmeal tomorrow morning, because there is another person who is my partner here, and we work together to be sure the pantry is stocked.

Also. He sends me copies of the bills he’s paid. He is paying the bills. We share costs, but the act of sending the money in, on time, every month, is no longer my sole responsibility.

Liberation can mean a lot of things: besides being free to do as you please, it frequently means doing everything yourself. But it can also mean giving some of that responsibility up to someone else. It can mean raisins and salt that you didn’t have to run out and buy yourself.
Thank you, my honey.

Patchwork living

I’m always struck when I visit Floyd County to see how people make a living in what is still a hard-scrabble place. Hard scrabble in a different way now than it once was – yes, literally the soil is rocky, but since most folks don’t make a living from the land anymore, they are scrabbling in different ways.

Driving down Highway 221 I see a hand-painted yard sign for small engine repair, “from ATVs to lawn mowers.” I imagine this evolved from a neighbor doing favors for family and friends, then deciding to make it a business. Ditto the hand-lettered “deer processing” sign – all those hunters, heading back to the city after a weekend, don’t have time to dress their deer. A business is born.

There’s also the woman who cuts hair at the back of the general store, and another who make barbeque sauce and apple butter to sell at the farm stand. 

It happens in other small towns, too. Every time I visit Chincoteague, Va., I consider spending an entire summer there, growing tomatoes to sell from a table set out in my front yard. If I had a front yard, there. There was one farmer who drove his pickup truck to the island every weekend and sold watermelons from the back. And I love the tables set out with seashells for sale. Fifty cents each.

When my income dips – and, in my business, it can be like a roller coaster – I often comfort myself by the thought of all the things I could do if I needed to make money just to get by. I always think first of baking pie. I could sell it to busy friends and neighbors too busy to bake at Thanksgiving! One summer between college semesters, I baked three kinds of bread and sold it at the local health food store. I don’t remember now how much money I made, but I do remember being crestfallen when my father pointed out that I was getting the electricity to bake with for free, at my parents' house. And I thought I was such a clever young business woman.

Today, I’m thinking of the big bag of chestnuts I gathered this morning from under the trees near our favorite country hideaway. If I were living near Floyd full time, I could package them in brown paper bags and sell them at the farmer’s market. I could gather wild nettles, a sort of gourmet foraging novelty, and sell those as well (they’re actually delicious, which I know thanks to a Floyd County potluck). Or hunt mushrooms for sale, or pick dandelions and package them neatly, the way French farmers do for the Paris market.

Instead of lattice-top pies, I could make hand pies, maybe team up with a mountain woman who could share her recipes, and we could pool our profits. We could sell to the tourists who come up the mountain for the fall leaves, we could use lard to appeal to the traditionalists, and vegetable shortening for the crunchy-granola vegetarians. I could write a book about baking with Esther, or whoever I find willing to tolerate my enthusiasm for tradition that isn’t even my own, long enough to bake with me.

Or, I could go back to the city and write more local news, more local travel, more education policy, patchworking a living together the way I’ve done for the past 20 years. Patchworks come in all different textures and patterns. I guess mine will remain, in some form, the written word.

Though if you really want a Thanksgiving pie, you know who to call.

Held up by community

All the most private moments – birth and death, tragedy, accomplishment – seem so intimate. Not only does it feel as if they’ve never happened to anyone but you, in precisely the way you are experiencing them, but also it feels as though they are moments you must live through utterly on your own.

Why is that? Because the truth is these life-changing moments nearly always involve community: celebrating, sympathizing, supporting, crying, laughing or cheering us on.

And so, our community held us up last month as we celebrated our new marriage.

Let me tell you how community – and locally sourced -- this wedding was. It started out with invitations hand-crafted by artist/design friends. Other friends volunteered to gather flowers. Another contributed photography. Our guests fed us themselves – they brought potluck to add to the food and drink we provided. Food is one of the greatest ways people connect, and I loved seeing the many dishes our friends contributed. A trifle with berries and peaches picked by my sister and niece! A favorite chicken dish with homemade pasta! And TWO wedding cakes: one that I know ate up hours of weekend and late night planning and testing turned out to be a masterpiece of crunchy meringue layered with tangy apricot, a sweet almond cake that was dense and light at the same time, topped with  rich buttercream and organic – yes organic – white roses. The other was equally meaningful, with a history involving seven generations of Myers women on my side of the family – well, eight, if you count Clara Dodd, the daughter who baked it!

Our children and friends did a yeoman’s job of helping with last-minute details, making signs for trash cans, making sure the stereo system was working, picking up food and wine, toting potluck paper plates and cutlery, and cleaning it all up when we were finished. And contributions continue, as guests share their photos with us in the best ways, on line and in beautifully crafted collections.

Then there was family who came hundreds of miles to join us, surrounding us by a sense of rootedness that only family can provide, siblings and their children and their grandchildren, reminding us of where we come from and where we are going.

Even the larger community contributed: the folding chairs for the ceremony were borrowed from the local church. The flowers were from the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market a few blocks away. The sound system was set up by the local music guru, whose friendly face is familiar to anyone who’s attended a Takoma Park Street Festival or an IMT concert at the Community Center, or shopped at the House of Musical Traditions. Organization help came from JudyTiger, a friend who once ran the community gardens in D.C. and who took time out of her organizing business to pitch in. Some of the food came from Middle Eastern Market, and we held the event at the Cady Lee House, a landmark Victorian home restored by one of the leaders of Historic Takoma and now used as office space for a community youth support organization.

But most of all, we had friends and family all around us, so that whenever I turned there was someone to help out, or just share the moment, and share the joy. Heartfelt thanks must go out to everyone who launched us into our very happy marriage.

To be surrounded by such a loving community was the best way to share this most intimate moment. 

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.