Bell's Seasoning

 Usually, on the day after Thanksgiving, I am happy to eat the salad that we traditionally bring to our feast that no one else ate along with whatever leftover soup that is in the fridge and a stray sliver of pie. I love the big mid-day meal, but no longer crave the piles of leftovers. This year, though, I am missing my mother’s hot turkey sandwiches.

 It started with the stuffing, which was the best. Finely chopped onions and celery, cooked with some pungent sausage meat, then mixed with two bags of stuffing bread croutons, already softened with water. Once everything was in the Big Bowl—we made a lot of stuffing—we would mix it by hand, one person mixing while the other sprinkled in the Bell’s Seasoning, a mixture of herbs that smelled strongly of sage. “Enough?” she would ask. We would both pause, sniff the bowl, and shake our heads. “More.”  The stuffing rested, mellowing, on the cold back porch overnight.

                In the morning, we stuffed the bird, letting the fragrant cubes spill out between the legs. More Bell’s Seasoning went over the skin and it was tucked into the oven. The stuffing and turkey baked together, flavoring one another. When the turkey was hauled out of the pan, we piled the stuffing into her best casserole dish, white with flowers, carved the bird, and made gravy with the drippings.  The entire meal smelled of sage and onions.

                The next evening, she would scoop gravy into a frying pan, add slices of turkey, and heat them up, hot. This was poured over toasted bread and barely warm stuffing that had retained all of its crunch from the day before. Some people might add cranberry sauce from the can, but I never did. We would bring our plates into the living room and watch T.V. while we ate. It was heaven.

                I know that I could make my own stuffing and turkey, my own Hot Turkey sandwiches, but a turkey is not a small endeavor and I no longer eat sausage. I’m not even sure where to find her specific brand, or the Bell’s Seasoning,  if I wanted to.  But I missed that pungent New England aroma this afternoon, as we eat our salad and cake leftovers.

Compost Trees

                When the hazelnut tree came down last summer, it left a huge hole in the back corner. For years, the brushy tree had shaded Mark’s compost area and hidden it from the alley. Now, he feels exposed. Today, we moved towards changing that.  First, we planted a small grafted plum tree to replace the huge, end of its life, plum that arches over the back yard and Mark has always loved (I pick up most of the dropped fruit…). The plums are small and yellow and the tree is old—it  usually grows mushrooms in September.  A few years ago, Mark grafted a branch to a sucker in the front yard, and it took. We moved the sapling into a pot and, today, into the ground. We were careful to not plant under the power lines. The corner was still empty, so we planted a native elderberry to arch over the compost hoops. The elderberry was a cutting from a friend that had also been living in a pot. It had an amazing rootball, so I am hopeful. We are still thinking about some tall, waving grasses to mark an entrance and screen the piles from view while we eat dinner, but at least a start has been made.  

Thoreau and the Cellar

                Cellars are important in Thoreau’s Walden. He describes his own, six feet square by seven deep, dug in sandy soil one afternoon, in the first chapter, thus creating a direct contrast to the pit he encountered in the Irishman’s shanty, which was covered, not by a hutch, but by the bed.  This is where he will store his potatoes and beans for the winter, so he was careful to dig below the frost line. In the same paragraph, he observes that the cellar is the most important part of a house, no matter how fancy, and the only thing that will be left when the house falls down.

                The last observation is true. In New England, when I was growing up, stone walls wended their way through miles of second growth, indicating old fields. And, in the corners, near the old roads, were cellar holes, lined with granite, sometimes filled with rusting trash. We climbed around in them; my parents used the one on our property as the shooting range for the BB gun. (My mother was a crack shot; she practiced on rats at the dump when young.)  

                Cellars still perform important functions. I am always aware of ours in November, because I spend so much time settling it in for the winter. We store all of our firewood in the cellar, sorted for fireplace and stove. The potatoes are in bins under the stairs. All of the canned goods line another wall, along with the rice, beans, grains, and teas that we buy in bulk.  The packing boxes for sending holiday presents sit on the desk counter. All of my pots for canning are stored down there, as well as the empty bee hive boxes and the extra apples and tomatoes. We have a box of Christmas wrapping paper and a box for birthdays. We bring the benches and chairs inside and downstairs. The furnace, water heater, and washing machine are in the cellar—it is the mechanical heart of the house. We also keep all of the stuff we are almost ready to clear out down there. I kept my old bike for a year or two, until I found a new home for it. There is still a bag of faux Tupperware and lids on the shelf. Mark holds onto old medicine bottles in a bag. Every four or five years, I do a cellar purge and clear out the excess junk, mostly by putting it out to the curb.

 I am not sure that Thoreau would approve of all of the stuff in our basement—it indicates that my affairs cannot be counted on my two hands, or even with my ten toes, and suggests that I should do some work to simplify my life. I think he would seriously object to Mark’s collection of vintage crockpots, burnt orange and avocado, waiting for harvest gold, on one shelf. However, the self-sufficiency of the winter stores and tools would please him, as it does me. It is the essence of New England, tucked away into the cellar.

Walden and the Beans

November is bean planting time in my classroom. We are about to read sections of Walden, where Thoreau contemplates the battles of weeds and beans in his life, and I realized a few years ago that not every student knew what a bean leaf looks like. So now, juniors plant beans: 2 Indian Woman beans to a four inch pot. If you bring your bean to “harvest” you get extra credit. It is not as easy as it sounds. It takes about two months from planting to the first little bean hanging from the vine. Plants grow long and thin, easy to break, on the north side of a building in November and ninth graders checking on the progress of a sibling’s bean can be a little aggressive. Accidents happen.  There are always jokes about who will not be raising food after the apocalypse.  Some people name their beans—Beanadette, Jim Bean- to help with the process while others bring in charms or fold tiny paper cranes. They water, and measure, and consider the beans every day, even when we don’t have class. They become, for a brief time, farmers.

Last week, one girl decided to sit with her bean during class. It had just put on the first true leaves, that bright young green that we usually see in early June. She held the bean, in its round pot, against her dark shirt, in front of her heart. Head down, hair curving around her face, stroking the leaf, considering its form… there were circles within circles, a poster child for Youth and Hope in dire times.