Commuting

Our two-week summer trip to Iowa is over; friends visiting from Iowa have come and gone; Will and Liam are in day camps for the next two weeks.  Liam’s is in Boston, and we are using public transportation to get there.  With a cooler day than the 100-plus-degree weekend, yesterday was a good adventure. 

Bill dropped us off at the station and we caught the “T” into Boston.  In the morning, this city train that runs every few minutes has plenty of room to sit since we board at the beginning of the line.  A couple stops along the way, a young man boarded and sat directly across from us. He was hooked up to earbuds and a device, so there was no chance of making eye contact with him.  Under his light blue New England Aquarium short sleeve t-shirt, tattoo-green octopus arms wrapped down his arm and below his elbow.  The artistry of that tattoo held my gaze longer than socially acceptable.  Liam and I decided that he worked at the aquarium.  We had this conversation just above a whisper, yet no one could hear us because all nearby passengers were hooked up. 

If I caught his eye, would it be appropriate to comment on the tattoo?  My curiosity grew with the speculation of what the rest of the octopus looked like under his sleeve.  What shape and how big was the hump of the head? What did the eyes look like? Or, was it just a tattoo of octopus arms?!?

This morning, same commuting routine with the addition of rain.  I stopped at a gas station to buy two small umbrellas as ours were nowhere to be found in the house or in my van.  Our backpacks were soon soaked since they stuck out beyond the protective field of the umbrellas.  We decided to wear sandals and crocs, knowing they would get wet yet dry throughout the day.  I drove to the station and found a parking spot a couple football fields away from the station.  We skipped over puddles and hugged the edge of the sidewalk farthest from the street to avoid splashes from passing cars.  Half the sprays spun up from the tires still hit us.  Head down and sloshing ahead, I recognized and sidestepped the remains of a dead rat.

The trains weren’t too crowded getting Liam to his camp.  Not the case when I headed for the library.  The train doors opened at the first station and people nearest the doors peeled out in order to let interior passengers get off.  Then we all piled in with the last row of people close enough to the doors to get their bums pinched when the doors closed.  I stood behind a man with his back to me, and I reached through a space near his chin to grab hold of a pole – just as he moved his head.  I nearly clipped his glasses off of his nose.  I apologized and was pushed closer to him by the passengers trying to protect their behinds from the doors.  I spooned this man for five stops.

I disembarked to make a connection at another station.  A train had broken down on the track earlier, so the underground rat trap was packed with wet, sweaty commuters.  Two trains were crammed full and waiting on another to leave the station before they could depart. 

Unsure that I had the fortitude to sardine myself on this final leg, I checked GPS to see how far I was away from the library.  A mile.  I needed to escape to the surface.  I saw an exit sign in the distance and headed that direction.  A train pulled up alongside me.  I would give it a try.  Merge, merge, push, push – I was on!  I was the one whose behind could get pinched.  Nope, with a bit of a shove that condensed personal space to zero, another row filled in behind me.  I needed to hang on to something, didn’t I?  Or, were we so tightly packed that I wouldn’t move with the lurch of the train? 

To be safe, I flung my left hand out and up toward the vertical bar in front of me.  Immediately, I realized that my arm was between a young woman’s eyes and the screen she was hooked up to.   Seconds later, like a calculated move in Twister, I moved my hand to a position just under the three other hands holding onto the pole, around chest height for me – as well as the woman whose sight-line I had been interrupting.  Her half-inch shift moved her bosom away from my arm.  In a bizarre way, this position seemed more commuter-acceptable than blocking that screen. 

She was one of the few who could get an arm up to hold a device.  A tall woman in the bottom-pinch spot held herself steady with one hand on the doorway ceiling.  A man shorter than me was next to her, and he couldn’t reach any train surface to hold onto.  He was relying strictly on the sardine-effect to remain upright.  My left hip was squished into another hip behind me whose owner’s face I never saw.

The distance between three stops translated to immeasurable time. 

I play a poor version of a disengaged commuter.  I felt every piece of human flesh pressed into mine.

And, I’m still frustrated not knowing what the rest of that octopus looks like.  We may be taking a train ride to the aquarium sometime this summer.

Devil's Food Chocolate Cake

For most of July, I’ve been working on the final part of my book — “A Menagerie of Recipes” — a recipe section that will be a kind of epilogue in Cornfields to Codfish. All of the recipes relate back to the essays within the collection.

July is my birthday month, and this year I was in Iowa and had my family all around the table at Mom and Dad’s for supper. After steaks on the grill, we had homemade birthday cake that my sister-in-law and my nieces had made for me. We grew up with homemade birthday cakes and often still make them in our house in Massachusetts, yet it was a special treat to have a traditional chocolate cake in Iowa, made by my family, and scooped out of the standard, well-loved size 9” x 13” pan.

My birthday cake reminded me of a recipe I’m including in the book, and I thought I would share it with you. In this section, each recipe will have a short essay to go along with it. It seems I couldn’t just write a list of ingredients and instructions without giving you a little history to go with each recipe!

Devil’s Food Chocolate Cake

I remember Mom making Devil’s food chocolate cake for birthday celebrations as well as an any-day dessert.  She used a recipe out of her standard household cookbook.  I wasn’t able to get permission to reprint that recipe, but after digging around in my stash of recipes, I discovered a “recipe” for Devils Food Cake in Grandma Murphy’s handwriting.  It was just a list of ingredients, no directions.

Finding this card reminded me of how solitary life on the farm was for Grandma Murphy when she was raising her family and farming with Grandpa.  She and Grandpa did not go out to dinner with friends on Saturday nights, nor did they go to church on Sundays.  She did not have a best friend or set of neighbors she regularly visited. 

The women’s voices that I remember in Grandma’s kitchen came from the AM radio show, “The Open Line.”  This program was on WMT, a northeast Iowa radio station, and Grandma listened to women call in to talk about and read off their recipes. 

I can envision Grandma listening while standing at the kitchen counter and quickly jotting down this list of ingredients as they were broadcast by another farm woman.  The instructions weren’t important; they were known: Mix all ingredients together, pour into a greased 9” x 13” pan, bake at 350 degrees for approximately 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Frost, or serve unfrosted with vanilla ice cream. 

In a large mixing bowl, I added one ingredient at a time and hand-whisked it into the batter.  I upgraded the cocoa to Dutch-process and the vanilla to Mexican, 35% alcohol; then I baked it for exactly 30 minutes.  I discovered that mint chocolate chip ice cream made on a farm in New Hampshire worked just as well as vanilla ice cream.

An Update from the Laundry Maven

I was in a recent conversation where people were talking about what they do when they are stressed.  Someone responded, “I clean.”  And another one responded, “I do laundry.”

I thought, “Hmm, what a strange way to handle stress.”

And then, the Laundry Maven said something to the effect of, “Damn right!  The power is in the laundry room!”

After listening to her for a few minutes, I had to agree. 

The Laundry Maven feels the rhythm of the laundry cycle and finds comfort in it.  The decisions are limited from beginning to end because she set the rules many years ago.  Constant decision-making and planning – the consideration of variables and foreseeing future moves as in a never-ending chess game – is diffused in the laundry room.  During the breast cancer year, nothing was so stable as those piles of laundry.

The laundry instructions are short and precise.  Sort the heaps into whites, darks, towels, and sheets.  Spray the stains.  Set up the drying rack.  Retrieve empty hangers from the closets. Wash; then dry twenty minutes; then hang shrinkable tops and bottoms. 

The Laundry Maven pays attention and enjoys the ever-so-slight nuances within, particularly the crackle of Liam’s shorts where plastic wrappers from juice packs and snacks have been stashed throughout the day.  She doesn’t check pockets, except for Liam’s, and only his because they are loud. 

Despite Liam never having met his Great Granddad Mills – Liam was born in 2006 and Granddad passed away years before in 2002 – the noise from Liam’s pockets consistently put him and Granddad in the same realm.  Just as Granddad fiddled with coins in his bib overalls pockets, Liam has bits of plastic moving throughout the day. The sound of the plastic crinkling in Liam’s pockets aligns his and Granddad’s grins.  Wash after wash, week after week, that noise brings Granddad and Liam into the same life sphere – albeit for fleeting moments – in the laundry room.  If we stay there long enough, I see my grinning Liam looking up into Granddad’s grinning face, hands in their pockets, gum keeping both of their jaws in constant motion.

Beyond emptying those pockets, the biggest bottleneck in the laundry process, is the cyclical lack of hangers.  Like missing socks, this must be a societal problem for often times the nearest store is completely out of stock.  This was recently overcome by a click on-line and the arrival of twenty-five additional plastic hangers the next day.

Like a row of hay rolls in the field at the end of a hot summer’s day, there is a visual reward at the end of a day in the laundry room.

Then, the cycle falls apart a bit when it comes to putting clean laundry away; it may take a couple days.  As the boys collect their piles of meticulously folded shirts from the laundry room, the Laundry Maven reminds them to put them in drawers, not in piles in their bedrooms, so the painstakingly perfect folds stay intact.  I remind the Laundry Maven to dial it back a bit; that not everyone understands.  Nor should they.  The Laundry Maven is an overachiever.

On days when I don’t know where to start – when indecision and choices and problems fall in an unorganized heap begging for attention, I prioritize three basic building blocks: food, clothing, and shelter.  Then on auto-pilot, the Laundry Maven steps in and says, “I got this one.  No worries.  You work on that menu for the week.”

I obey, comforted that the Laundry Maven has the sanctity of her kingdom in check.  At the end of the day, the table may be cluttered and the countertops sticky.  And without a doubt, the kitchen floor will hold evidence of the day’s meal preparation (if it wasn’t for the floor, I wouldn’t be able to cook).  Despite all that, no one will be hungry and everyone will have clean underwear for morning. 

And the next day, strategies for those responsibilities outside of food, clothing, and shelter will unfold, given that a solid base has been set with attention to those basic necessities. 

And then, Linda Malcolm just might sit down to edit the recipe section of her book. 

Or write a note to some friends.

Big Sky Iowa

If Iowa wasn’t so tied to farming, it could be in competition for Montana’s slogan of “Big Sky Country.”  Rather, with “A Place to Grow” and more recently “Fields of Opportunity,” Iowa’s slogans squarely place the visual toward the fertile, black farmland.

I grew up with the summer slogan of “knee high by the Fourth of July,” which was how tall corn should be by this time of year.  As long as I can remember, the field corn has been more like shoulder high on the Fourth of July.  But with late spring cold temperatures and devastating rainfalls, this year is different.  On a four-hour drive down the middle of Iowa, perhaps 5% of the corn was elbow high.  Most of the corn in the rolling fields could be measured with a 12-inch ruler. 

No matter how much of that humid corn heat we get in the normal corn-growing months, farmers need an extra-long growing season this year.  They need heavy heat through September and dry days through October before they can harvest any kind of quality crop late October or November.  Within the last few years, harvest has been done and equipment tucked away by mid-October.  Snowflakes will undoubtedly land on much of that equipment this year.

Farming is an extended, stressful game of roulette with nature.  A relentless pursuit of hoping for the right numbers to come up. 

At Mom and Dad’s on our annual summer visit, we were sitting at the kitchen table around 8:30 p.m. when the room abruptly dimmed.  There was a distant rumble of thunder as what felt like sunset fell upon us.  A peek through the south-facing small window near the pantry confirmed the blackening sky.  I opened the south-facing back door, and a quick glance confirmed that the storm front was south of us and not directly overhead.  Nothing was spinning; it was a solid mass of darkness.  Perhaps that is why I ventured outside – that lack of spinning. 

Four feet from the door, a white crack shocked me as it went from heavens to horizon.  It was an upside-down firework, a simple white blade of lightning.  The tightness of the lightning, followed by its immediate disappearance, was surreal.  Surely something that powerful should be longer lived than seconds.  Given the intensity of the crack, the solid, black storm cloud should have fallen apart like a freshly broken eggshell.  The strike was probably miles away from where I was standing.  And there was only that one.  Perhaps it was the tail end of the storm?

From behind me came light.  The tight, tall 50-foot high tree line along the west side of the house protects the buildings from wind and snow.  And it limits the open sky visible from the house.  Chasing sunsets, I venture around this border every visit when oranges and pinks highlight the clouds above and tease through the evergreen boughs.  This evening was no different: the sunset beckoned through those evergreen branches.

Satisfied that any additional bolts of lightning were too far south to reach me, I crossed the barnyard and shinnied through a narrow gap between the wooden fence and the barn.  That fence marked a division in the sky between north and south.  Past the fence was a pure summer sunset, unmarked by storm clouds but rather simple, white, fluffy clouds ran lightly across the northern sky – just the right amount necessary to catch the orange and pink rays that were cast up and over to the clouds in the northeast quadrant of the sky. 

To watch the sunset meet the true horizon in July felt wrong; the entire sunset was visible where sky met land.  Three days later, I realize why there was such a disparity in that sight: the field of corn behind the barn is only a foot tall.  In a normal year, this horizon line would be blocked by shoulder-high cornstalks.

After soaking up sufficient sunset, I turned south and squeezed back through the gap.  The whole southern sky was still dark and ominous – but, still, no spinning.  Mom and Dad’s white house contrasted against the dark, but my eye was drawn to another set of colors.  Looking like a gatekeeper between the northern and southern skies, a full rainbow arched over the house.

While sunsets are photograph-able, there was no way to catch Big Sky Iowa on film this evening in order to convey it to a third-party.  While the division between sunset and storm-set was powerfully marked in the sky by a rainbow, on the ground the border was a simple fence and bin between the barn and the hay shed.