Hoarding Parsnips

 

                True confessions: I have a hoarding problem. Scrap wood, yarn, nice condiments, clothes I have not worn in years but loved….all very hard to clear out, although I have made a good dent in the scrap wood pile recently. But, right now, my biggest hoard is….parsnips.

                We like parsnips, so, every spring, I direct sow a nice fat ten foot row of parsnip seed, plant out the leeks to one side, the celery and some carrots and beets on the other, and consider it the Winter Soup Bed.  Parsnips thrive much better than carrots or beets. In the fall, we mound leaves around them and wait. First, we eat the last of the zucchini on the vine, which can run into November. Then it’s time for cabbages and winter greens, squashes and onions. Sometimes I think “parsnips?” but the thought of hauling them out of the wet cold soil, knowing that the tips have buried into the subsurface of clay, is daunting, so I wait.  Another day, I assure myself. I do pull some early on sunny winter afternoons, but not many.

                And then we hit late March. It’s early leaf season…all of the cabbages are gone, the few winter squash are no longer sweet, the late potatoes have sprouted and wrinkled, and the onions and garlic are growing a bit soft in the middle. No asparagus yet. Just raabs and leaves at the market. Maybe some radishes but radishes are not a meal. It feels a bit grim.  I walk out to the  Winter Soup bed. There are leeks, looking a little battered by the ice storm in January, but still green. And the parsnips are just beginning to grow little tufts of greens on their heads, so I can see where they all are. I plunge my hands—then the pitchfork—deep into the soil, being careful of the irrigation hose nearby.  I tug. One booted foot in the bed, two hands deep into the slowly warming ground. Tug. Twist. Tug. And it comes loose. A Parsnip.  Big enough for dinner, just one. It’s a glorious moment.

                I see the five foot long line of parsnips before me…soon, I’ll be rummaging through the British cookbooks in the library, looking for the parsnip cake recipe.  And making parsnip soup. And roast parsnips. And parsnips sautéed in butter. And vowing to NOT hoard the parsnips for next year.  We’ll see.

Working Class Irish?

 

      

          The couch has been calling my name lately. The weather has been grim—cold, rainy, muddy, wintry mix—for the last three weeks. We go out during the breaks; we cleaned out the shed yesterday, slogged through snow uphill on the trail last weekend, but the couch…is very attractive.  I’ve been reading a mystery set in Ireland, in a tightly woven working class neighborhood and all I can think of is—how did my English/German family (White and Seckendorf!) learn to be so….working class Irish?

                My grandparents lived, for years, in triple-deckers in Somerville Massachusetts, an architectural  design which I still love. My cousins and I would visit during our school breaks; we’d drink sweet hot tea with my grandmother, wander down the street to the corner store to pick up her cigarettes and some candy, read  or play rummy on the back porch, and fall asleep on the pull out couch to the sound of Boston talk radio at night. I would spend hours rearranging the pantry and occasionally making a boxed cake If I was really lucky, I could walk over to my cousins on my father’s side to visit. They all let me go on my own; I was ten.

                My grandparents were the center for parties, especially in winter. Christmas, New Year’s, Saint Patrick’s day (we went to the parade in South Boston some years), get –togethers  after wakes and funerals….it was all there in the second floor dining rooms. After dinner, cousins ran around in two packs, older and younger, and, as the middle child, I tried to stay small and still at the table, so that I could listen in on the conversation.  The air was thick with cigarette smoke; cans of beer ranged around the table. Three or four aunts, a couple of uncles, and my grandparents  would start with gossip, mild at first and growing juicier as they went into the second beer. By the third, they were ready to sing. They always started with a fragmented version of “”Fling out the flag of Newfoundland” because no one knew all of the words. They moved onto “Cockles and Mussels”, my grandfather would give everyone a ditty about “bedbugs and cockroaches in the Chelsea jail” and then popular songs of the day like “Knock Three Times” or “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.” No one had a beautiful voice but they could all carry a tune. They sang with gusto. After the third beer, however, they could turn maudlin—count off how many family members had passed over and how many years ago—or nasty. I remember arguments and guilt being thrown around, old grudges emerging from the bottom of the beer. Finally, everyone went home, leaving me and a cousin behind for a few days. Everyone had a hang-over the next day.

                We also had a challenging relationship with the Catholic church. We all attended though First Communion and had our photos taken in the white dress or the serious suit. And then we stopped going. I am not sure why; Sunday mornings were more interesting at home? My mother did not like the priest? It was the late 1960s and church was just not important any longer? We were on the road? But it left its impressions. We had St Christopher medals. I have a drawing of a heart with a crown of thorns that was in my bedroom throughout my childhood. I still know the prayers, the genuflection as you pass the holy water, and  the stations of the cross,  and so a Catholic service feels familiar in a way that others never will. And the guilt. My entire maternal side of the family was a master class in guilt.

                And this—the singing, the drama, the family weight of guilt—all appear in the background of my book. Working class Irish. How did it happen?

               

The Bay Tree

 

               About twenty years ago, when my friend Maureen and I organized organic garden tours for Northwest Earth Institute fund-raising, I bought a bay “tree”. It was about a foot tall; I planted it in a pretty terra-cotta pot and it lived on the front porch, protected from the cold. I picked a leaf or two from it occasionally.  After about five years, we moved it into a wine barrel in the side yard and wrapped it when the temps went below about 25 degrees.  It was a bush.  I nipped leaves for cooking beans and gave it some grey water in the summer.

                When it broke through the barrel, it began to Grow. We stopped watering it in the summer but that did not slow it down. Six feet tall and wide….eight feet tall and wide…I climbed on a ladder and gave it a hard prune and gave away some trimmings. It grew. I pruned it again. Everyone I knew took branches away for their own kitchens.  It grew. I took off half of the tree—it came back with an impressive burst of new growth. It reached into the columnar apple and the tea bush planted (also in barrels) on either side.  The grape vine has sent out feelers to tangle in its branches, creating a bit of a foliar arch into the back yard.  Last year, I trimmed it out of the path to the back yard and stepped out of the way.

                This winter, we have had several ice storms, which bend the branches down. Traditionally, the branches come down for a day or two and then bounce back up to reach for the sky. This year, they, I am afraid, like the new horizontal position.  The birds love the bay; it houses a colony of juncos who wait every morning for me to put out their seed on the ladder. A towhee emerges every day to peck at dropped seeds. They all hide in there when it rains. When the wind blows from the west, as it does eight five percent of the time, the entire tree sways like an animate object, creature with  over one hundred arms, reaching for the sky, the house,  the grape vine, and the plum tree.

                I am not sure what to do with this creature. There are days when it feels like it is going to take over the side yard—but it does not block or shade anything of value. I don’t really want a full sized bay tree; it has been coppiced so often that it does not have a main stem to bring forth as a design feature. But it is a nice green screen.  It does add flavor to all of our soups and stews  in the winter. It blooms. It protects birds. It produces green trimmings for my cuttings of daffodils….and it sways in the breeze at dusk, a living thing just out of the corner of my eye.