I couldn't tell you a conversation of any great consequence that I ever had with my Granma. I can hear her voice in my head. I always liked the way my name sounded with her twangy northern ontario accent, but there are no particular words that come to mind.
What does come to mind: Beets. Large, like 5 gallons large, white plastic buckets filled with homemade pickled beets. I love them with all my heart. They were always cut to a perfect two bite size, four if I cut it up smaller and smeared the excess juice around on my plate. I liked how the purple liquid would mix with the white and blue of her beautiful blue wedgewood china. I liked to set the table, well, as much as any kid "likes" to set the table, let's call it finding the positive in child labor. I tried to find all the cutlery that matched and turn all the plates so that the little people painted on them were facing perfectly forward. Don't you find it funny when you reflect on your life and the things that seemed so normal are actual a text book case of early onset OCD?! I digress, which actually highlights my point for me, food is the language of love. Not that nauseating, smootchy love, cause when you have that who can actually eat anyway?! Food is what nourishes us and the people who provide it for us are the ones that love us, care for us and want us to grow.
My Granma died this week.
I'm glad she got to go. After a long, hard, full life, she was diagnosed with alzheimer's a few years ago and in the word's of Sweet Brown "Ain't nobody got time for that".
As we all do at these times, we sit, reminisce and catalogue our memories to try and lift our spirits, to somehow drown the sadness with happy thoughts. All I came up with was beets.
I remember everything about them. How I was too little to get the lid off the giant bucket myself. This is most definitely a good thing, because I probably would have climbed inside and eaten my way out. I once ate so many beets I peed purple. (Too much information? Too bad.) I remember the tupperware container that she would fill and put on the table at every meal, like it was salt and pepper's long lost triplet. It was the most amazing tupperware; it had this magical little draining basket in it so the beets could swim in the juices, but when you wanted one, you lifted it up and they were all sitting there drained, ready for the eating. There were no beet vs fork fights at the bottom of the jar like I do when I'm trying to get the last pickle - you know what I'm talking about, stop laughing at me. I love pickles too, but we are talking about beets, focus. I feel pretty certain that my Granma found me to be an odd child, what with the love of beets and wedgewood china, but I couldn't be more thankful that I had a Granma who made me beets.
Once I'd carefully catalogued my childhood beet affair, my mind was free to ponder other memories… crab apples.
My grandparents lived on a farm with a lawn as far as the eye could see, a barn, a vegetable garden, many many bushes with burs (that's another story, but let's just say my mom always dressed me in wool, sent me out to play and some how it was my fault when I came back covered in burs?!) and a gloriously large, shady crab apple tree. It threw up apples all over the lawn like a teenager on prom night. So what do you do with a never ending supply of crab apples and 5 grandchildren at your disposal? You give them each a basket and tell them they don't get any dinner until they fill it up (note, this isn't the first time I've mentioned child labour, oh those were the days!) It only became known to me in the last week that my Granma loved to sit under that crab apple tree, I guess that memory was blurred by all the horrific memories of collecting crab apples on an empty stomach. Weird. I'm glad that something that reminds me of her was one of her happy places.
I spend a lot of time, cooking, eating, searching, researching and trying to create little mouthful of happiness, usually with preposterous techniques and expensive groceries. My Granma could create one of the quintessential childhood taste sensations with 3 simple ingredients and a butter knife: peanut butter and jelly on white bread. My mom never bought white bread, it was always brown and yukky*, yes that's the technical term. My mom never bought the "good" peanut butter, it was always brown and yukky* and tasted like peanuts - not like the sugary goodness from the "Skippy" jar. She always got ours from the health food store. I can't remember, but I'm sure whatever kind of jam she bought was brown and yukky* too. (I love you, Mom) Now that I think of it, I think she always bought weird jam, like blueberry and marmalade - yukky*. My Granma has soft, sweet, white wonder bread, sugary, salty, creamy peanut butter, strawberry jelly that I'm sure had as more sugar in it than strawberry and it was delicious. She kept it all in the bread cupboard with one if those pull down doors. I was too little, so I had to wait until no one was looking, climb up on the counter, slide the jammed door up with all my tiny might and make myself a sandwich the way she did. And, since no one was watching and I didn't want to get in trouble for getting peanut butter in the jam container, I would lick the knife in between.
I've learnt of many other, of my Granma's gastronomic idiosyncrasies in the last week - I had totally forgotten her ability to bite ice cream. Try as I might, I've never been able to do it with my wimpy, cold sensitive teeth. I remembered how she would hide pennies and dimes in homemade cakes and the unfortunate biter would get a prize.
There was nothing pretentious, nothing extravagant, nothing remarkably notable, almost forgettable about food at her house, but believe me, it was always good. My Dad visited her not long ago, and the memory of her that has stuck with him about her fight to find the lighter side of Alzheimer's - "Who remembers what they had for breakfast anyway?!"
So I ride this train enroute to her funeral, eating my cut fruits and over priced cheese, which will surely be a new culinary memory to remind me of her. The fear of ever forgetting her has been lifted, we are not guaranteed to keep our memories but I will always have my beets.
*This morning for breakfast** I ate ground peanut butter from the health food store on an organic rice cake and it would have tasted even better with some blueberry jam on top.
** Yes Granma, some people remember what they ate for breakfast, but I'm weird like that.
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