The Book Club at TheHighCalling.org

I can’t offer a close read of five chapters, today, though I may do so later in the week. For now, I want to quickly paint for you the difficulty of discussing four or five stories per week from The Spirit of Food:

Chapter 2: I’ve eaten October tomatoes at Brian’s house.

When I first walked into Brian’s house, I spied a pan of steaming bruschetta, fresh from the oven: little rounds of bread topped with yellow and red tomatoes, smelling of olive oil and basil. We’d been eating at restaurants for days, on the road. My children and I were on a long October road trip, from Boston to Pittsburgh for a wedding. My husband Scott drove with us to that celebration, then he flew back home while the kids and I traveled further west toward my dad’s house in Indiana.

Sometimes a visit “home” tears me to pieces. “Well we’ll put you back together as much as we can, then,” Brian had said when I planned the trip. “And we’ll probably enjoy doing it.” We stayed for one night before visiting my hometown. And we stayed another night before the long drive back to the coast. I overheard an earnest argument between Brian and his wife over who was getting more time to talk to me. They played my favorite music on the stereo, just by guessing, and they plied me with wines from Wendell Berry’s vineyards. To be “at home” while traveling—I found myself near tears, eager to soak up their hospitality. It wasn’t my last visit. The next time I brought my husband Scott, so we all could be charmed.

I saw this essay in process, long before I knew of any food book. I can see Art, with the thumb’s worth of dirt above his brow. I love how beautifully-edited the story is, now. I suffer good-family-envy when I read the story. And I also see the marketplace, the faces of the people who greet Brian on the street, his vibrant wife, the backyard garden.

Chapter 3: Jeanne has a magical voice. Go listen to it on the Image Journal website!

I love how her prose sounds exactly like how she speaks. I’ve been through an ugly church breakup, and I’ve seen how some non-religious communities feel a lot more like communion than some churches. I feel like I’m with her.

Chapter 6: Robert Farrar Capon is one of the true loves of my life, and I say so later in the book.

Chapter 9: Someday I will tell you how I came to be a part of this book.

Chapter 11: When I met Alissa, she was just entering the health crisis that would challenge her way of eating, but you wouldn’t look at her and say “crisis.” I saw her shinny up a tall lamppost in the pouring rain—the lamp shone all night, and we’d all been complaining about it. She covered it with a garbage bag. While climbing, she wore a long knitted duster and her cat-eye glasses glimmered. She looked like a superhero to me, when she returned dripping, triumphant. Last summer I heard Alissa read this essay aloud for her graduation from the SPU MFA program.

Chapter 12: Nancy Nordenson read this story in a small circle of friends in a hotel room, after a day at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing. I realized, then, that she’d experienced this disaster while we were both in Santa Fe—she, for her last graduate residency, and me for my first. I had been so wrapped up in my own life as a new student, I knew nothing of what she endured. I continue to admire how she weaves stories together. Such a rich thinker! See her story in Comment.

Chapter 14: Kirstin was the first editor who accepted my work without knowing me in person. She wrote such a glowing letter of recommendation for me—I carried it around in my journal for years.

This is how The Spirit of Food goes for me. I could keep numbering a paragraph or two for each of the chapters, each remarkable essay. I know exactly how lucky and blessed I am to have my writing included in this collection. I think Brian said something like, “I will hope to live up to this.” Yeah. The Great Cloud of Witnesses, that’s what I sense when I read the book. We are all—those who write, those who read, those who eat—so deeply blessed by Leslie’s editorial vision. 

january

Thank God, Thank God, Thank God and without thinking too hard the words ring out through my condo, Thank God Almighty, free at last.

I step onto the chair and onto the kitchen counter. I grab one handful of cookbooks, and a second handful, dust the tops and place them into the box waiting on the counter. In goes the waffle iron, clean from our Christmas breakfast, and the ice cream maker ball.

I will not eat from you until you are in a new kitchen.

And the books are tucked in, and the lid is fit on: I have packed the first box. I take a moment to dance and sing.

Early on the morning of December 24^th, Scott and I met with the owners of a rental house in the town where we hope to live. When the doors opened to a wide hallway, both of us grinned—the place is so NOT perfect, so different from the homes we’ve been looking to buy. And we liked the place. And it seemed huge, in comparison to our condo. We signed a check and left in a daze. We’ve leased a house with enough space for us to live.

My glee is tempered by the expense of rental, and what could be a free-fall into permanent status as renters, not home-owners. I can’t get purely excited without reminding myself of the risks.

On the other hand, it is morning of the first day, and I have packed the first box. We are moving. We are moving.

yarn-making

butternut

One butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cubed. Two butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cubed. Cecilia asks me if I’d like a different chore and I say no, I’m in a groove now. The French knife takes off the fat end of the squash, a perfectly round bowl of seeds and pulp. Slippery skin the color of cream, tough, and firmly affixed to the fruit of the squash. First I scoop the seeds into the compost bowl, then I try to skim off the skin with the knife, then the vegetable peeler. Beneath the pale skin I find veins of green that run the length of the squash. I peel deeper to the pure orange flesh, then slice off the bottom of the bowl. Slices, then squares and all the gold bits go into the large pan.

My daughter and Cecilia’s daughter laugh over their enormous pile of sweet potatoes, the peels to one side of the cutting board and the odd-shaped nuggets on the other. Cecilia sautés another five pounds of minced onion, along with a few pounds of celery and God knows what else. We discuss the price of organic squash versus the price of Trader Joe’s perfectly-good squash. She asks about my house-hunting and my teaching. I ask how her job is going, how her masters degree is coming along.

When I return to the thick stem-end of the squash, the squash nectar beads in a pattern along the cut end, clear orbs each catching the light. I lift the squash for a closer look and the pattern of bright droplets stays in place. Like lace, I say to the girls, or like dew on a spider web. They touch the droplets then taste their fingertips. They shrug and it's time to cube more squash. 

But for just a moment, I saw it, the blessed secret of the butternut, the waters of creation, like lace.

sorely tempted

And so it was that I looked upon the beautiful pink orbs, nestled in an old oblong china dish from Grandma Fern, and I weighed the likelihood that anyone in my family would notice the tomatoes missing.

No chance at all. I live in a world where the fresh food goes unnoticed until the packing of school lunches, the quiz in which I ask, “did you pack a fruit and a vegetable and a protein?” Yes mom, yes mom, yes. No mom, the apples and bananas are all gone. Scott buys them little disposable cups of fruit cocktail, and I would rail against the waste of money and plastic, but I’ve seen them open the wee cups and sip the juice, first, before tucking into the fruit. My children do not drink liquid unless forced, so I concede to the little wasteful cups. I too am fond of the papaya chunks. God alone knows what preservatives rest in there. I close my eyes to the issue: they drink, and they eat fruit. And they leave me the perishable items which don’t pack well.

Dear God, the tomatoes! The last tomatoes from the last farmers market of the year, heavy, not orange or red but pink, art-worthy tomatoes. Heaven forbid that they go bad, waiting for someone to find an appetite. On Sunday I sliced one for a sandwich of grainy bread, goat cheese, and basil. I ate two such sandwiches, leaving half the tomato next to the cutting board with a knife. No one touched it, despite my announcements. I found a container and sealed it away tightly in the frig, but it can't last, there.

I’m allergic to fresh tomatoes. If I stop at half a tomato, two sandwiches, the sandpapery sensation will be mild, like I burned my tongue but not badly. If I continue to nibble tomatoes, red fissures form as the result of my rich tastes, followed by blisters and several days with a wounded tongue. Cherry tomatoes, so easy to snack on, must be rationed, first, then hidden behind something else in the refrigerator so I don't grab another handful.  

Andalusian Gazpacho is the tomato glorified, pureed with fresh bread and a touch of garlic. Not a Mexican gazpacho, not spicy, this soup is not home to any other vegetables, no peppers, no cucumbers, no onions. Just tomato, olive oil, a splash of vinegar, a pinch of sugar, and a few ice cubes to chill it. I remember the first taste of it, how ugly the color, how the soup stood up in the bowl at The Walnut Street Café in Erie, Pennsylvania. The restaurant didn't last a year, but the memory stays.

Today the whole glass of sweet gazpacho sits before me, two and a half pink tomatoes’ worth to be drunk slowly, rolling the summer in my mouth while watching the boats in the harbor. I walk back to the kitchen to scrape the blender clean, remembering not to stick my fingers under the sharp blades. Sorely tempted to find that one last spoonful. The blisters rise; I have accepted it.

Too often my solo meals consist of peanut butter from a spoon, or a handful of trail mix, now that green beans are not in season. Inelegant non-meals, anti-meals. The late summer lettuce is long withered, and I don’t know how long the fresh basil will hold out in my windowsill. How much more should I take the price of life and endure it? How much more ought I pour love into a glass and drink, despite the cost? Drink, while the season lingers for one more moment.

A toast, then, to the fall harvest and what comes next. A toast to the passing of summer fruits. I will remember these tomatoes for the next few days of sandpapery tastes and stinging, my last late-summer extravagance. I will not repent this tall glass, well worth the expense.

splinters

"Lately I’ve been thinking, and I need to get this down quickly--that grief splinters…it splits off into fragments,… and that each of those fragments then has a life of its own. Every day is a new way to grieve, and this morning, very early, I was sitting in the attic window watching the rain and I tried to imagine even one of those splinters--could I hold on to even one? Could I contain it for a day, an hour? – and it struck me as a story that could be told in science fiction. A woman loses her brother, or her brother is lost, and every moment of every day for more than ten years she rises and begins to grieve, and the grief leaves her body in something like a cloud and goes about its business. "

Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early, page 185