“Yes,” I exhaled. “I do.”
For some reason, going back felt like the very definition of moving forward.
I had said it: I wanted to go home. It was hard for me to admit, but moving away from my hometown two years short of my high school graduation had somehow messed with the flow of my natural exodus. The city, where I’d found the culture, the books, and the people I’d been looking for, wasn’t enough. I didn’t even like that damned town, and never thought I’d want to go back and live in it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d left something behind there that I needed to retrieve. Aaron, a post-high-school flight risk like myself, felt a similarly inexplicable urge to go back to the town to which he’d never expected to return. He didn’t put a name to it, and neither did I, but I could feel the energy of what pulled him.
Somehow in fusing our two minus-forces we had made a strong magnetic positive. The charge between the poles of our two homes—rural and urban—remained strong and tight with tension, setting our insane future migratory life together in motion.
11
ARE WE GOING TO BAKE THIS BREAD IN MY LIFETIME?
That spring, after we decided to move in together, I took Aaron to Pierz, my parents’ hometown, to meet Grandma Dion.
Addie Dion, my mom’s mom, lived in a green rambler the color of lime Jell-O on a side street a block off Pierz’s Main Street. For years her sprawling backyard was taken up with an equally large garden, whose far edge reached the backside of Thielen Meats, the meat market and smokehouse owned by generations of Thielens on my paternal side. (As it often goes for two fated families in small towns, the path between doors was beaten well before the formal link took place.)
Like many a Midwestern house, Addie’s had a formal front entrance decorated with Catholic statuaries that no one ever used; the tiny side entrance into the kitchen received the heavy traffic. You walked in and pried off your boots in a precipitous two-foot-square foyer, walked up two steps into the bright yellow glow of the kitchen, right into the kitchen table wedged into an alcove. The move that felt most natural was to sit down, which most people did. I cannot recall that table without people stuffed around its perimeter, all talking, eating, and drinking in a liberated fashion, and its top was never bare.
Every opportunity to turn a plain day into a more delicious one was taken; my grandma took levity where she could get it. Losing her husband to leukemia left her with three daughters under the age of four, very little cash to sustain them, and no choice but to run an incredibly tight household ship. In a house where the loss of the father whispered in the corners, the food at the center of the table set everything right with the world. Her cooking was thrifty but extravagantly rich, heavy with meaning and flavor.
Whenever I arrived, Addie sent me to the cellarlike basement cold storage room for provisions. I pulled a jar of fermented pickles from the shelf, its zinc lid frosted with salt. My reach was short inside the ten-foot-long chest freezer, so I heaved my belly onto its edge to retrieve the frozen sugar cookies and foil-wrapped chunks of poppy-seed coffee cake—a little lost balance and I would have been interred in a giant coffin. She laid out these items with dishes of sliced ham, salami, herring, crackers, and cheese. And always in the middle of the snack chaos sat a fat square of butter from the Little Rock Creamery a few miles down the road. Waxy and dense and pale, it was “very lightly salted,” she liked to point out. It tasted just like the famous butter of Brittany.
Some nights she made beef soup with shaggy clumps of tender meat and tiny curled fists of tan natural wild rice, its broth as clear and brown as weak coffee. Or slabs of coppery-pink Thielen Meats ring bologna cut into pointed rounds and fried until the edges crisped sharply like a new penny. This peppery bologna wasn’t bouncy, wasn’t made from suspicious meat scraps like the stuff sold under the same name everywhere else. In fact, Uncle Keith insisted that it contained “nothing I wouldn’t eat,” and he’s a rib-eye-eating sort of butcher. It melted in our mouths.
When we had eaten all of it, she ran the heels of her homemade white potato bread through the oily pan juices. “Try this,” she ordered. “It’s what we girls on the farm used to call dip dee.” The bread, slubbed with ropy sausage juices, was transcendent. It was best followed up with a cleansing forkful of her paper-thin-cucumber salad, properly bludgeoned with freshly cracked black pepper and shivery with vinegar.
She delighted in all seasonal delicacies. When spring’s little silver fish ran in the freshwater streams out of Lake Superior, she was promptly in attendance at the smelt feed at Flicker’s Bar, the same bar in which she’d worked as a cocktail waitress as a young widow. The bar owners brought in the tiny fish by the pickup load and then had a party to get them ready: while drinking beer, the bar crew gutted thousands of fish and cut off their heads by the half dozen with an office paper cutter. Line ’em up and whish! Headless fish ready for their batter. It was exactly the kind of food theater that Addie loved.
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Addie came from a time when cleaning and cooking were indivisible, and her housekeeping bordered on an overabundance of caution. If there was a bunch of pens in a drawer she would gather them together tightly with a rubber band, putting the kibosh on their potentially uproarious scattering. She repainted the walls in the house every year, just to “freshen them up.” In her garage, a tennis ball hung from a long string attached to a wooden rafter over a rectangular carpet sample, perfectly positioned so that when she inched her car into the garage she stopped when the tennis ball was hanging directly over the center of her car hood, at which point her gas tank would be directly above the carpet rectangle. Untold cement stains were prevented this way. Her rags—her rags—were bleached until the chemicals ate holes in the fabric.
It was the same story in the kitchen. She and my mom spoke reverently of the women who kept their houses so clean that “you could eat an egg cooked on their floors” and less so of others who were such pigs that anything they cooked “couldn’t be sanitary.” (“Soap is free,” Addie liked to add, a holdover from her farm upbringing.) It’s no wonder that the best bakery in the area was called the Sanitary Bakery. To me, the name brought to mind maxi pads rather than great doughnuts, but I got the point: Cleanliness was good. Sanitation was the goal. Add bleach and you had the triune god.