It started with corn.



I’m not particularly into corn.  I admit it tastes good eaten in season.  Clad in a many-leaved husk, hydrated by corn silk, and requiring careful shucking to get to the yellow starchy kernels, is only worth my while in season.  I typically eat one ear of corn-on-the-cob per year. 

I’m pretty much the same with potatoes, although the potato season isn’t as clearly defined.  We don’t grow a lot of potatoes in Douglas County.  Home gardens, yes, but that’s about it.  (Now don’t be Tweeting me if I’m wrong.)   My grandfather grew three crops in his large vegetable garden:  strawberries, corn, potatoes.  He’d dig up a pail of new potatoes for Grandma to cook into a trough of creamed potatoes and peas.  I don’t know where the peas came from.  I don’t think frozen peas existed in the mid 1950s, yet I have no memory of coerced labor shelling peas.   My grandmother was not a skilled cook.  I don’t say that unkindly, she was a marvelous woman, she just wasn’t into cooking.  She had creamed peas and potatoes down though.  Oddly, I don’t remember eating any corn.  Ever.  My uncles would willingly and eagerly (to my eternal amazement as I was such a lazy kid,) head out to the strawberry patch and load up huge bowls of fragrant berries, a side to a typical breakfast of backstrap venison, fried potatoes and milk gravy, biscuits, oh yeah, canned grapefruit.  I have such fond memories of canned grapefruit.  Is there any in the grocery stores these days? 

But I sorta lost track for a sec. 

All the men on my mother’s side logged, a physically challenging job requiring mass infusions of calories.  In my family, the women cooked.  And cooked in mass quantities.  Slabs of meat, (invariably dry as a bone.  Thankfully there was always good gravy. Oops, I digress.)  Vats of potatoes to accompany.  Green beans with bacon swimming atop.  Whatever vegetables were in season (generally over-cooked,) and real dessert to finish.  Mom’s were delectable.  Ethel, not so much.

I’d be gang-pressed into making lunches, being a girl and all.  I have a clear memory of Ethel criticizing the skimpiness of a p&j sandwich I’d made.  It was a complete surprise as I’d made the sandwich exactly as I liked:  thin layer of peanut butter topped with a thin layer of jam.  Yeah, so?  So.  Apparently the men in my family wanted a thick layer of peanut butter topped with a thick layer of jam.  Hmmp.  No accounting for taste. 

Weekend mornings, there we’d be, crammed around the dining table, us kids sitting against the wall, probably to contain us (good idea), with Uncle Howard, Uncle Lynn, Dad, Grandpa, maybe Uncle Leland, surrounding us, and leaving space for Mom and Ethel to bring in the eats amid a cacophony of conversation.  We children lost interest in sitting still once we’d finished eating and the adults took great delight in making us climb under the table, past all those legs and feet, to freedom. 

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