Maybe it’s the Story

Curious

Last night for dinner we ate corn on the cob with butter I’d made in the morning and that was pretty good. Three ears each and a glass of milk from the morning’s milking and I’d’ve had another ear of corn if there was one. But the boys had picked and shucked only a dozen ears and last time I checked 12 divided by 4 is 3 so that’s what I got. Truth told, it was plenty.

For lunch there’d been ribeye steaks from the beef we’d slaughtered a few weeks prior and I fried up a passel of chanterelle and hedgehog mushrooms I collected from Melvin’s woods before I made butter. We had green beans, too. Steamed those suckers, piled on the butter and some salt and they hardly knew what hit ‘em. There were chunked potatoes roasted in lard and I snuck the ‘taters from the far bed in the wedding field, so-named because it’s where our friend Bob and his brother Brian erected the big cedar pole and green-tarp “tent” we had our wedding party under 16 years ago.

Sixteen years. Some of the people who were at our wedding are dead now, some you’d expect and at least one you wouldn’t. The ones who were babies then drive cars now. The ones who were middle age then are wondering what the hell happened, where all the time went, the years between their babies being babies and their babies driving cars. Yesterday my parents were over and Fin drove the truck down the farm road and across the field (he’s 12) and my father said something about him driving and I said “only when I’ve been drinking” which I at least thought was pretty funny. (Q: How do you know when Ben’s told a joke? A: He’s the only one laughing!)

Anyway. You see how it happens.

Breakfast… let’s see. That was an omelet. Eggs still warm from the coop and a filling of fried potatoes, leftover green beans from the night before, a snuck onion, a clove of garlic prized off one of the bulbs hanging above the stove wood on the porch, hedgehog mushrooms I’d gathered the evening before (we’re gathering mushrooms nearly every day now, such is the profusion of edible fungi at this time of year), and a good bit of the maple sausage Penny and I made back when the boys were up in Canada with Nate and we were stuck in the kitchen processing the two pigs we foolishly saw fit to kill in July when there’s way too much going on around here to spend three days killing and cutting pigs. See? We make mistakes all the time. Mistakes we shoulda seen coming months away. Even mistakes we’ve made before but in our stubbornness refused to learn from.

Sometimes I think we eat too well, that we have too much choice, that it’s making us soft and jaded. I remember when Nate was staying here, how I’d stroll down at dinner time to find him stewing a beaver haunch and maybe a few leaves of kale over an open fire. Of course, he also ate with us pretty often, never turned down an invite and seemed to enjoy the fresh butter and eggs and meat at least as much as we do. Probably more, considering the alternative was stewed beaver and kale, though I never got the sense he didn’t enjoy that stuff too, come to think of it. I never heard him complain. I never heard him say “man, not stewed beaver again!” I mean, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with beaver, but it sure ain’t ribeye steaks. It’s not an omelet filled with your own sausage and fried potatoes dug from the ground that once sheltered your wedding party.

On the other hand, to Nate, who’d trapped the beaver, and tanned and smoked its hide for eventual inclusion into the beaver-hide vest he was working on at the time, maybe it’s every bit as good as these things. Because when I think about it, I wonder if maybe it’s not the food that matters so much. Maybe it’s the story.