Dark Flavors

Talking with my mother at dinner this weekend.  We talked of food.  She grew up on a farm in Ohio, her grandparent's farm, not her parent's.  Her father did not farm nor garden and by all accounts didn't want to do much at all.  He talked about starting a junkyard--his big dream.  But my mother's mother was an only child and did not move away from her parents, so when she married, she and her new husband moved into a house on acreage adjoining the farm.

Clarence, my great-grandfather, had a small, working farm.  He had a large field planted with vegetables, and he had some milk cows and a horse and a few pigs.  He kept a chicken coop for eggs.  He sold eggs and milk and occasionally vegetables.  He owned the woods behind the farm and had dug a pond up there for irrigation.  It was filled with small fish and turtles and frogs.  There was a river across the highway where he would go for larger fish.  There were berry patches and wild strawberries and rhubarb and asparagus and morel mushrooms and the other kind that I cannot now remember, and there were big hickory trees where hickory jacks, a large edible fungus, grew.  There were pear and apple trees and wild pau paus and elderberries and blueberries and grapes and in the summer every kind of melon.  During the winter, men (not my grandfather, though) hunted for squirrel and rabbit and an assortment of birds and anything else that was moving about.  They even ate the most awful and oiliest of animals, the groundhog.  A few times a year, they would go and shoot a deer.  She told me of watching the frog legs twitching as they were put into the frying pan.  At night, they would pop corn from the farm, and in the morning what was left over got sugared for breakfast cereal.  They canned and pickled everything they could in summers and kept the jars in the cellar dug into the side of a hill behind the house.  She hated it when they sent her there to get something, she said, for snakes and spiders were always about.  I remember the smell of that cellar, for I was there as a child.

It was a lot of work, she said, and she does not have too much nostalgia about it.  But as we talked, I thought of how it is all lost.  Yes, a lot of work, but I want to eat those wild things and taste those strong flavors.  I have had most of it, have eaten rabbit and squirrel and elderberry preserves.  I've opened those sealed jars my grandmother laid up and pulled out last summers vegetables.  And, of course, I turned my back on all of that.  Now. . . I just want to taste them again.

My mother, though, is pretty much satisfied not to have to do that any more.  And therein, I think, lies the tale.