Ages ago I had weekly feature on WCAI called 'A Cook's Notebook'. From time to time in this space I’ll be posting some revamped versions of those radio essays. The original ACN pieces that aired in the early 2000s live on the PRX Exchange.
When Esta arrived late to The Ladies of the Grange Potluck & Planning Meeting they were abuzz about the grand opening of their newly renovated post office. Bev was complaining that her p.o. box was too low. How do they expect a crone like me to bend over every day to get my mail? And Mrs. Griggs harped that they put mine as far away from the counter as you could get. Esta hadn’t missed a thing.
She’d brought her usual dish, what The Ladies always ask her to bring to the potluck - cheesy scalloped potatoes. It was plain and good and everyone said they liked it.
Esta cooked from the hip. She didn’t doll it up like some of those molded fruit salads that quiver and wink when you walk by them. To her, they looked like scantily clad beauty queens wearing caricatures of makeup. Besides, the winter wasn’t the season to be serving raw fruits and vegetable ribbons in Jell-O exposing all those parts to the elements - that didn’t make any sense to her. Esta’s potatoes were tucked-in, safe and warm, layered with cream and milk, butter, onions and cheese.
That night the dry forced-air heat had everyone blinking, clearing throats and shedding layers. Bev repeatedly apologized for the broken thermostat whenever there seemed to be a lull in the conversation. Bev hated silence.
While pondering a stuffed black olive, Esta silently wished that it had been Bev’s pastry bag that had broken down instead, because ever since she got that gadget she’d pack just about anything full of her port wine and cream cheese spread, speckled with chopped pimentos. An unholy red and orange miasma. No soggy canned olive, mushroom, celery stick or even deviled egg was safe from Bev’s piping tips.
The griping about the post office turned into another chorus, this one about the weather. The strangest ups and downs…snow storms then rain storms then sun storms then flood storms…echoed the sopranos.
Esta an alto soloed Why won’t you just say it? … Climate crisis.
Her eyes circled around the Ladies to see if her words caught wind. They had.
Bev trills: I know you know and I keep saying it so you must be sick of hearing it but I am just so sorry about how hot it is in here…
Esta rubbed her clenched jaw.
Finally they got through the planning of the Ice Cream Social - who’d sell tickets, scoop ice cream. Make butterscotch and hot fudge sauces. Organize strawberries and whipped cream.
Before bed that night, like every other winter night, Esta checked on the potatoes sprouting in her closet. They were her secret for coping with the season’s rigors. She kept them close by with their blind eyes opening up in cool darkness from nests of onion, some dried oak leaves. The sprouts grew by taking what they needed for nourishment, leaving their mother-roots withered and shrunk. These were fleshy white and purplish things covered with a fine hair with tiny clenched fists of infant leaves ready to unfurl. She’ll plant them once the fear of frost had sure enough passed.
A winter that had nothing to do with dates on a calendar and challenged even the Farmers’ Almanac made her distrust the sun. By March she thought of it like a ruse, a lie of a two-faced planet that spewed cold white light one day, something hopeful the next. So she kept her potatoes well away from it.
As wind whipped through the trees outside of Esta’s window, rattling the frozen sap, shame before sleep seeped in about her aggravation with Bev and the Ladies that evening. Winter has a tendency to make everything and everyone brittle, it seems. Besides, she knows she doesn’t always get it right either. Her scalloped potatoes were undercooked and over-salted.
Succumbing to the darkness she focused her last thoughts on the life sprouting in her closet as she went deep down under her featherbed. I’ll start again tomorrow.
The thaw would come soon and the real sun, the hot one would be back. She knew when Spring was coming. The potatoes told her so.
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wow....smitten.
I miss this kind of your writing - it just lingers - in all the right ways