Fruitful Seasons
Mimi Wheatwind

    “…He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons,
    filling our hearts with food and gladness.” Acts 14:17

I remember it was raining the Saturday my sister Annie called. Not that rain is unusual in Oregon, especially in the spring. I had been on the phone a lot that week--with my older brother Phil in sunny Los Angeles, and my dad and step mom, Willie, in Northern California. When Willie confirmed earlier that week that Dad had colon cancer, the rain matched my mood: uncontrollably teary, and shadowed by sodden gray clouds. My brother, sister, and I had been playing phone tag with each other after hearing from Willie, and were trying to coordinate our schedules for separate visits to see Dad, and be a help and support to our step mom.

So when Annie called, I had my vacation dates posted by the kitchen phone, along with flight numbers and arrival times. Phil and his wife DiAnna had driven up to Sacramento while dad was in the hospital; they were still with him, recovering from surgery at home in Rocklin. They would stay till the end of the week. I planned to wait until Dad had recovered enough to start chemotherapy before I flew in. Annie’s year-round teaching schedule in Salt Lake City gave her three-week breaks every few months, but she was checking with other teachers at the juvenile detention facility where she worked to see if anyone could cover her classes so she could fly out to California sooner.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said when I picked up on the first ring. Her voice sounded as sad as I felt.

“I’ve got some info for you,” I said. “Do you have a pencil and paper handy?”

“Listen,” she said abruptly, “There’s no other way to say this. I have cancer, too. I’ve already had the biopsy, and they’re recommending a mastectomy as soon as possible.”

“No!” Not now, I thought. “Are you sure?” I wanted this to be a mistake, a weird joke. Except we didn’t joke about things like our health, because the even weirder thing is this: Dad had an obsession about “not being around until he was an old coot.” He often brought this topic up at holiday feasts—tapping his glass with a knife, letting us all know he’d made out a Will, or declaring he didn’t want a burial, he wanted cremation. Yeah, Yeah, we’d say, rolling our eyes while passing plates of food. Dad was fit and cantankerous; we expected him to be around for decades, despite his doomsaying attitude.

“Yes,” Annie answered firmly, “The doctors are sure, and I can feel the lump. But they think if they operate soon, they’ll get all of it.” And then, in a softer voice, “I’m sorry.” For some reason, Annie had inherited this bizarre obsession of Dad’s. For years she said “I don’t see myself living beyond my fifties.” If she still believed this after she reached forty, we never heard her say it. When I called her on her most recent birthday—her forty-ninth—I joked, “So, next birthday, do we start counting backwards?”

“Oh Annie,” I said in a wash of tears, “I’m sorry too.” I listened as she replayed the week’s events: she’d met with her doctor on Tuesday, but knew how hard it was to reach us, so she’d decided to wait until the weekend to call everyone on the same day.

But then Dad went into the hospital unexpectedly on that same Tuesday, and had a small tumor removed from his upper intestine. After Dad and Willie learned the biopsy results for Dad’s cancer, Willie had called everyone. Annie’s three children—Emily was finishing college at the U, Joshua and Faeth lived and worked nearby—all knew about her breast cancer. I was the first she’d reached that Saturday morning.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. I want to see Dad! I don’t know if I should tell him. But if I don’t go see him, what do I say?”

In the end, it was Willie who, in her Mother Hen role, took charge. Annie was instructed to “just stay put and get well. And Don’t Worry!” My sister had her own circle of friends and family there in Utah who could take care of her. She decided to wait until her next school break before beginning her own exhausting round of chemotherapy and radiation. By then maybe Dad would be well enough to visit her.

From my distant perch in rainy Portland, I turned commute time into prayer and “healing energy” sessions, and surreptitiously devoted work time to research. The fact that I work at the world’s largest independent bookstore was a big help: on my lunch breaks I read cancer survival stories, and pored through cancer nutrition guidebooks and cookbooks. I made photocopies of upbeat anecdotes from Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivor’s Soul, and mailed them in “Get Well” cards to my Dad and my sister, with back-up photocopies for Willie, and Annie’s kids. At home, my soul mate Janice and I paged through recipes, planned menus, and made shopping lists. Then we cooked. Our home filled with the steamy fragrances from our “test kitchen.” We made easy-to-digest soups and nourishing snacks, we baked high-protein custards and casseroles, and we juiced and blended fruits, vegetables, spices and roots in ways we’d never considered before. (Who would have thought to fight nausea and aid digestion by juicing together beets, parsley, ginger and celery?) We brewed hot ginger lemon tea; we pureed and froze pumpkin soup; we baked fruit crisps and rice puddings.

When I flew in to the Sacramento airport weeks later, I was armed with an ice chest full of frozen juices and soups, and a book bag stuffed with recipes and cookbooks. Dad and Willie were both there, waiting at the bottom of the escalator. Dad looked skinny and frail, but he was beaming. His chemotherapy treatment had been delayed because of all the weight he’d lost before they discovered the tumor. He hadn’t been able to keep any food down for days, and thought he had the flu. I remember seeing him just after the Christmas holidays: pale and thin, and complaining that his energy “wasn’t what it used to be.” He chalked it to being in his 70s. Now his cheeks were a healthy pink, and his blue eyes sparkled, despite his needing to gain a few pounds.

“Like it or not,” I said, “You’re a cute old coot.”

“I can live with that,” he grinned back.

In the kitchen, Willie showed me the drawer where her spice jars nestled in neat rows, and which cupboards held baking pans and mixing bowls.

“Our home is yours,” she said. “I’m going to let you take over in here, while I take a little vacation from cooking.”

Dad was a little dubious as I unpacked groceries and made room for them in the fridge. “What’s this?” he asked gruffly, inspecting a container of soft tofu. “Too Foo? No way! I’m not eating any damn Too Foo!”

“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “Some of this stuff is mine. We’ll find some other ways to fatten you up, Skinny Bones.” He gave me a hug, and, other than insisting on doing all the dishes, he left me to my own subversive devices during the week I was there.

We soon settled into a routine: a high protein breakfast (scrambled eggs with green onions and spices the first morning—I decided not to mention the ½ cup of crumbled tofu I’d sneaked in), then, before it got too hot, Dad and I took a mid-morning walk in the suburban neighborhood of Rocklin. As we strolled, we’d circle the maze of avenues and cul-de-sacs into noisy construction zones of newer housing complexes—the air pungent from the smell of fresh paint and wet cement. Dad would point to the far ridges of brown hills, already dotted with orange flags, where even newer housing developments would soon go up. Our talk often turned from urban blight to the wetlands preservation we could see from his backyard, to his boyhood days, growing up on a farm in Iowa.

Of the three times we visited Dad’s folks when I was growing up—all of them in the summertime (“the fruitful seasons,” as Granddaddy always said)—only two vacations are clear in my memory. One was the summer I was ten, when all five of us traveled there in a sweltering ’56 Ford, and the other was the summer after I finished high school, when, with Phil fighting in Vietnam, only Annie and I accompanied Dad on the long hot road trip to Battlecreek. We’d talk about those vacations together—not my complaints about the kicking and lethargy of the three kids in the back set for hours in a car with no air conditioning, and not our city-kid disdain for a hometown that was smaller in population than my high school graduating class, but the green fields of the farm, the sound of cicadas at night, the abundance of shooting stars.

After our walk, Dad would settle into his recliner to read the paper or a book, with the radio tuned to his favorite jazz station. At lunchtime we’d linger over sandwiches or soup and bread, watching from the table as hummingbirds, sparrows, robins, blue jays and mockingbirds showed up at the bird feeder in the back yard. If we were lucky, we’d glimpse a pair of deer or elk in the wetlands ravine just beyond the property line.

In the afternoons, Dad often napped and Willie checked email in her sewing room, while I chopped vegetables and mixed dressings and sauces for the evening meal. My siblings and I grew up in a home where meals were always prepared to an unspoken timetable. Dad worked two jobs, which meant he often left before any of us woke up. If he made oatmeal, there was usually enough left for the three of us, still warm on the stove when we got up. He left money for Phil, who doled it out to us on school days for our cafeteria lunches. Evening meals had to be hot and ready when Dad got home—usually at 5:30—and they always had to contain two important elements: meat and potatoes. Respecting that Midwestern doctrine was my biggest challenge in the years after I left home and Dad came to visit. Fortunately, Willie’s prowess in the kitchen had won Dad over to an occasional rice dish, or casserole. But my upbringing had also changed over the years as well, returning me from a vegetarian to the omnivore practices of my growing-up years.

As I cooked, sometimes Willie would take a deep breath over a simmering pot, or hand me a garlic press or lemon zester I hadn’t known to look for. Otherwise, the time I spent in her kitchen was quiet. Even when my dad occasionally whistled nearby, I’d lose myself in a meditative labor of love, remembering the different kitchens of my childhood.

Preparations for supper on the farm often began soon after the lunch dishes were washed ("warshed” was how Dad and his Iowan family pronounced the word), then stacked in the open shelves of the roomy kitchen. At age10, I was considered too young to use a knife, so my tasks involved measuring, peeling, mashing, and stirring. I usually did these things at a post on the far end of the large wooden table in the center of the room—far enough away from the four-burner stove (“with a griddle in the middle,” Dad often reminisced, as he flipped pancakes into a round pan for us on weekend mornings). I worked at a distance from the kitchen’s more bustling activity, just beyond the reach of any spattering pops of hot grease from one of Grandma’s cast-iron frying pans.

But before any cooking began, Grandma and I, each dangling oval wicker baskets on one arm, went “out back” to her garden. Hidden on the south side of the barn, we had to “Shoo! Shooo!” our way through clucking chickens, then hold our breath past a low-fenced pig pen---where grandma upended a bucket of table scraps and vegetable peels to a grunting clamor of hungry swine—each one almost as large as my little sister. Then we unlatched a tall honeycomb-wired gate from its leaning post. Once inside, we harvested lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, snap peas or green beans, and, if there was one ripe enough, a large, oval striped watermelon, which grandma clutched in one hand, gathering her apron hem against her waist, holding it as if it were a fat little baby, curled in a hammock.

All of the vegetables we’d gathered, warm and dusty from the crumbly brown soil, were taken to the black-handled well pump near the kitchen’s back door, rinsed under the icy water, then placed in a large white enamel dishpan. After this was done, two stainless steel buckets were placed under the well spigot, and I lifted and pushed the heavy iron handle several times, filling each pail three quarters full. Then Grandma lugged and set each one on the two back burners of the gas stove to boil.

I was familiar already with some of the supper we were going to prepare. At home in our narrow suburban kitchen, this was a weekly meal we’d eat on the Sundays Dad didn’t have to work. Phil would set the table (inspecting every fork tine and knife edge for signs of “those girls’” haphazard dishwashing, but also for evidence of “bacteria and germs,” which he was learning about in science at school) while Annie and I helped Dad with the endless peeling of potatoes, or we tore lettuce, chopped celery and tomatoes, and grated carrots for a salad. Then I would dredge pieces of chicken in seasoned flour, setting aside milk and a smaller amount of flour for later, when we’d help Dad make and stir the gravy. In the winter months we opened cans of sweet corn or green beans, which we cooked in a small saucepan and poured into a bowl. When it was in season, we preferred corn on the cob, jumping on the linoleum at the sound of ears bumping against the lid as they boiled in the large pot. We knew the ears of corn from the supermarket would be crunchier and tastier than canned corn, but those store-bought cobs were never quite as sweet as the fat “yaller” ears I’d pull from the stalks taller than me in our grandparent’s Iowa fields.

“Stand clear, now!” Dad would always announce as he plopped the white dusted chunks of meat into the hot oil of our own cast iron pans. Using a large fork, he’d lift and turn the sizzling pieces so they’d brown just right on all sides, then transfer them to a deep Pyrex Glass bowl, lined at the bottom with a clean, folded “grease cloth.” He’d put it on the middle rack of the oven, set to the lowest temperature to keep everything warm until the potatoes had been mashed and the gravy, stirred and heated to just the right creamy thickness, was poured from the frying pan into a bowl, and all brought to the table at once, steaming hot.

I loved those Sunday suppers. I would come to understand the importance of my dad’s nostalgia for large mid-day farm meals, once I saw the acres of corn and their adjacent fallow fields that Grandpa left at dawn to plow in his old red tractor. “Dinner,” Dad explained to us, “is what farmers say instead of lunch, but really it’s the same difference.” When Grandpa and my uncles clomped into the kitchen in their muddy work boots, sunburned and dusty at noon, their appetites required something more than a peanut butter sandwich, or the canned soup and a handful of saltines we were used to at home.

Our Sunday meals with Dad were often a flurry of activity, followed by a meal heartily praised and enjoyed. We didn’t usually experience this when our Mom threw something in the oven or set a pot on the stove before dashing off to work. I don’t remember calling what she did “cooking.” We’d have fish sticks—two apiece, lined up on a cooking sheet and baked in the oven, then served with a dollop of watery canned spinach, from a saucepan heated on the stove. To this we’d add a piece of bread slathered with margarine and jam. Or she’d leave us to heat our own canned “Spaghettios,” or Swanson’s TV Dinners. We had our favorites of these—Salisbury Steak, and the Turkey with dressing, since the only time we had a “real” turkey was in November, when we drove over to Mom’s parents’ for a holiday meal. We liked the Fried Chicken TV dinners as well—but these were considered a species apart from Dad’s, or Grandma’s at the farm. We ate them quickly, enjoying the extra crunchiness of the chicken’s skin, or the pudding-like texture of the butter-dabbed instant mashed potatoes. But our pleasure came from the need to satisfy our hunger, rather than enjoying what the tiny aluminum tray compartments contained. We might as well be eating a cookie in one of those shopping mall specialty shoppes: warm and crumbly from being under the heat lamp, then slipped with a pair of tongs (by a perky teenager in a cheerful smock) into a little white paper bag, but never as good as those cookies grandma would carefully lift from a cookie sheet with her spatula onto an unfolded paper bag on the kitchen table, warm and freshly reminiscent of the batter you had just licked from her wooden spoon.

What was remarkable about suppers on the farm was the fact that nothing—not even the meat—came from the supermarket. As the gray metal buckets of water on the stove started to steam and bubble, Dad or one of my uncles would stalk out to the yard, and in two or three strides, reach two long arms down and clap their outstretched hands together, closing an unsuspecting hen’s wings against her round body. With her orange legs kicking and small head turning to and fro, she’d appear to be nervously levitating as she was transported at a careful arm’s length to Grandpa, waiting at the chopping stump.

I usually looked the other way when Grandpa’s axe fell, but I often watched curiously as Grandma, holding each headless chicken one at a time by its webbed feet, dipped one first into a pail of boiling water to leech the blood and loosen the feathers, then into a second pail of water to cool the body enough to pull the smaller pin feathers from its bumpy flesh.

I have heard a number of stories from friends about the defining incident that turned them from a meat-eating omnivore into a vegetarian, or vegan. Their stories often involved a pet animal on a ranch or farm, which disappeared one day, only to appear on a steaming platter on the table. Or they were inspired by some documentary about sheep or cows, rendering my friends incapable of partaking of the slaughter of these innocent beasts. While I could empathize with my friends, I didn’t share their feelings. As a child I was only aware of how much sense my Dad’s family’s life made. There was work to be done, but it all seemed focused on a life that was healthy, and, if not rich in the city sense of things and styles, there was a respect for and enjoyment of a different kind of abundance. On many summer afternoons, there would be picnics outside, and talk at the tables as kids ran in the leafy shade, or clanged horseshoes at a metal stake. Or someone (who raised cows, and swapped so many eggs and an occasional roasting hen with Grandma for bottles of milk and cream) would bring an ice cream maker and everyone would take a turn, cranking the handle. Most of all, there always seemed to be enough for everybody—no matter who showed up and “pulled up a chair” (or scooted us in from the end of a bench) to join us.

At home, food came from the market, and was carefully budgeted. Each week on payday, if we went with Dad to shop, a careful count was made of how many boxes of cereal and cans of soup and vegetables went into the cart. If we wanted “Libby’s, Libby’s, Libby’s,” because we could sing the TV jingle, we could only have it if it was the cheapest brand on the shelf that week—which wasn’t often. If we bought fresh fruit in season, there was enough for each breakfast—but not enough to share with the neighbor kids after school.

At the farm, not only was there plenty of fruit in season, there was a dim pantry with fruit that had been “canned” (an odd way of describing food that was actually sealed in jars) from seasons past. In the coolness of evening, Grandma sometimes rolled chilled balls of dough (which she’d stored early that morning in cotton dishcloths in the fridge) out on the flour-dusted counter for piecrusts. She’d let me set a pie tin upside down on the flat continent of dough, then map a generous shore around the tin’s edge with my finger. She’d follow my indentation swiftly with one circular movement of her arm, a knife grasped firmly in her hand, then lift and drape the dough over her hand like a thick veil, unfolding it into the upturned, oiled pan. I would press the sheet of dough carefully against the sloping side, pinching along the knuckle-wide rim so the crust would bake holding to the shape of the pan, and not overflow its contents past what I imagined was an edible, pebble-sculpted wall.

As Grandma unscrewed the band and pried up the lid of a heavy quart jar of berries, she’d say something about who canned them, or where she’d picked them, or who had brought over “a basketful” one afternoon, giving her and a friend something to do while “listening to the radio,” or “watching the tube.” As we unfolded and patted the top layer of dough, pinching it to the bottom layer’s edge, she’d let me cut crescent-shaped “steam holes” in the top, or, if there wasn’t quite enough dough to reach, we’d cut strips of dough and lay them in parallel stripes across the mound of glistening sweet fruit in the pan, and then weave cross strips through, lifting and placing strips over and under, prompting her to ask me if I’d noticed the arbor of roses in her neighbor’s yard, woven from hickory branches, or the lattice-patterned quilt upstairs, folded at the end of my bed in the slant-roofed attic room where I slept.

But there in the oven-warmed kitchen, bedtime was still hours away. As the pie baked, the cloth that had been removed and shaken free of crumbs from supper was replaced and smoothed on the table again, or, if it had collected too many spills during the meal, it would be thrown in the laundry basket, and the shiny oilcloth protecting the table’s oak surface would be sponged clean. Then we’d all sit—children and adults together—and play cards. While the littlest ones were still awake, we’d play fish, or smaller games of war. But most of us caught on quickly to the grownup game of “Penny Ante 31,” and managed to find or beg our own pennies to slap down cards with the confidence and authority of any of the adults. And always, while the cards were shuffled or dealt or laid on the table in round after round (the pennies in the middle really the insignificant point of playing), we’d engage in what Grandpa and dad and my uncles called “chewing the fat.”

As a child I never thought of that expression much. If Dad mentioned it at home, as in, “If my brothers were here at the table, we’d chew the fat till daybreak…” it immediately called to mind those summer evenings on the farm, a time of childish jokes and adult banter and reminiscences. But as I grew older, I wondered what it really meant. Where did such an expression come from? Were we metaphorically chomping tough pieces of gristle, or greasy rinds from an overcooked piece of steak? Or were we chewing something more cow-like, our jaws moving as if we were tonguing gum from one set of molars to the other, ruminating as we talked, inwardly digesting the lazy summer flow of laughter and conversation? Perhaps I’m being too literal here; because, more often than not, someone would be waving a chicken drumstick (the only way to eat fried chicken with Dad or his family was with our fingers) and when anyone used that expression we’d nod, smiling as our teeth bit into our own pieces of chicken, savoring the skin’s salty crispness, our mouths full of just the right amount of juicy meat. Those meals were delicious, not just because they had been cooked perfectly, but also because we were sitting together, sharing something that happened as regularly as Sundays at the end of the week—suppers we would crave hungrily once we’d left home—savoring our memories of something as ordinary as a family meal, with keen tenderness.

By the end of my week with Dad and Willie, I’d refined my menu repertoire for my visit with Annie. I’d already whispered reports of failures and successes to her over the phone, so she knew what to expect. Like the morning earlier in that week, after Dad and I had walked almost two miles, I’d blended some vanilla soy yogurt, fresh orange juice, fruit sorbet, and a banana. Pouring the thick shake into two glasses, I brought one over to Dad in his recliner. He looked suspicious.

“I don’t drink my lunches,” he said warily. “You go ahead; I don’t want any of your weird concoctions.” I clinked my glass with his.

“This isn’t lunch. Just think of it as a mid-morning refresher, Mr. Bones,” I said.

He drained his glass in two long draughts, leaving a pastel mustache on his upper lip. I waited for his verdict.

“Not bad,” he said, licking his lips. “Not bad at all.”

Another hot afternoon later in the week a neighbor dropped by to see how Dad was doing. I juiced beets, ginger and celery, and mixed that with apple juice, then poured the frothy liquid into wine goblets.

“To your health, everyone,” I enthused, not telling them exactly what they were drinking. None of them guessed all the ingredients.

Annie’s kitchen was smaller than Dad and Willie’s. It was cheerfully crowded at times, with Joshua stopping by on his way to work, and Emily and Faeth spooning samples from a pot on the stove, or copying a recipe to use after I’d gone.

Annie’s recovery had been complicated by an ongoing infection, but her chemo had been successful, and her hair was growing back thick and dark, with a dusty gray sheen providing a silver halo above her deep blue eyes. It was a pleasure to sit with her over a serving of ricotta cheese pudding, watching her smile when I reported, “Dad loved this, even after I confessed I’d used soy yogurt in it.”

As I write this, it’s another rainy season in Oregon. I’m about to take another “vacation” to see Dad again, who just finished a successful round of radiation, this time for lung cancer. On the phone I promised him chicken soup, with “no tofu.”

“Bring your running shoes,” he instructed, “Or you won’t be able to keep up with me on our morning walks.”

Annie has been cancer-free for over two years now. She’s busy helping Faeth plan her upcoming wedding, which will be in the Uintah Mountains in July. Dad and Willie didn’t make it to Annie’s 50th birthday party, because Willie was doing radiation treatment after two lumpectomies. But she’s doing fine as well. We seem to have formed a small “Cancer Survivor’s Club” in my family, one that is connected as much by a mutual holding pattern as it’s connected by our love and concern for being there for each other, in whatever way we can. When I told my friends and co-workers how I was using my vacation time, they asked if my family thought all my kitchen concoctions were the key to their recovery. I don’t think so. It’s not that I don’t think the food was nourishing—it was. But I remember everything else that went with the preparations: the phone reports, the private tears, the prayers and silent mantras, the cards and calls and neighbors and friends and family who mowed the lawn or pulled weeds or sat up all night at the hospital, taking turns with us because their love was equal in measure to the love that was keeping us all in that relentless holding pattern together.

We’re all looking forward to seeing each other at Faeth and Scott’s wedding. For me, the ceremony will begin before my niece and her beloved share their vows. It will begin when our family joins Scott’s at the rehearsal dinner the night before. It’s still months away, but I know we’ll have much to be thankful for during that “fruitful season,” as we laugh and talk and eat together, celebrating life, and filling our hearts with food, and gladness.