It was corn.
A cut kernel must have popped off my cutting board and landed directly below the sink, where my vigorous sloshings sprinkled it with water and the sun beaming through the window gave it a rooting chance.
I laughed and let it live for a day. The next morning I skewered its roots with a butter knife, dragged it out, and dropped it in the compost.
—
My dad was glad I was back in town, if mildly suspicious. The man who had known me previously as a sore teenager gifted in passing on late Macy’s bills found my new rustic life a little incongruous, but, to his credit, never said so. He simply shook his head and pronounced that we were “living on love out there.” What we were living on, literally, was a blooming vegetable garden and a fantasy that was part hippie and part nineteenth-century homesteader.
The feeling that we inhabited a different era, or maybe the twilight zone, persisted when I went to town that summer. Walking Park Rapids’s Main Street, crossing the double row of parking in the middle of the street, the scale felt off to me, as if I’d dropped into a miniature diorama. The streets looked too wide, the stores too small, the people as faux-familiar as television characters. There was my fifth-grade sex-ed teacher, ringing up my order at the coffee shop. There was my brother’s hockey coach—never could remember his name—waving me down. Faces came back as if in a dream, characters I should have remembered. It had only been six or seven years since my mom had moved us to the city; to the residents of Park Rapids my absence was just a sliver. I retreated back to our house, and to 1895, and fired up the oil lamps.
The truth was, if the place hadn’t been a little intimidating, I wouldn’t have liked it so much, and the lack of electric light compounded this. That fall, every night at 6:30, just before dinner, we experienced about twenty absolutely nonilluminated minutes: When the darkness fell inside the house, the oil lamps couldn’t compete with the glowing sunset. It wasn’t until the sun slid behind the trees that the lamps could finally take over.
After dinner, Aaron set a lamp by his side to work on a large bas-relief wood carving, using chisels and a mallet to knock images into a six-foot-wide slab of bowling-alley floor he’d scavenged. Its scene involved intriguing buildings and situations: social clubs whose members had recently taken off, leaving the evidence of their wrongdoing right in the yard; garages with trucks backing out; uprooted trees whose wiry roots formed a madman’s hideout; tiny little broken-down fences leading to nowhere. One evening when we had our neighbor George Kueber, the owner of the sawmill, over for dinner, he teased, “Would have to be a pretty skinny rabbit to get through that fence you carved!” The carved slats were as thin as flat toothpicks, and the varnished, painted edges were soft and rounded, as if overfondled by generations.
I tried to be similarly creative and junked around with a letterpress set I’d found at a garage sale. But not having a crafty bone in my body, mostly I read, to my total saturation; there was nothing else for me to do. I sat at a table covered with cookbooks, books of essays, the Becker County historical records of Two Inlets Township. In this I read of people who shot ducks and nailed them to the outside of their cabins to age, judging them ready when their bodies fell from the necks; of times when porcupines were protected, even if they did strip and kill trees, because they were so slow and could always be caught if a person was hungry; of the Widow Knapp, one of the first settlers in Two Inlets Township, who lost her husband soon after she moved out into the forest, but at the end of her hardscrabble life “drank her cup and murmured not, happy now in her old age to think she won the fight, and is honored by all who know her.” I was particularly drawn to the farm women’s journals, to stories of women who made complex impractical pastries in rudimentary kitchens, who wrote of making “chicken fixings” in the flush times and suppers of “just flour doings” in the lean.
When I put aside the books and tried to write—something, anything—I was totally stumped for subject. The idea of writing fiction, of making things up out of the ether, terrified me. Instead, rambling paragraphs destined for essays came out, nothing more than quotable fragments. Finally, after much sighing over the legal pad, I reached a conclusion: I didn’t have anything to write about. It was with pure, hedonistic glee that I realized this and capitulated to my real obsession: reading cookbooks. I treated this infatuation like it was a job and gave it all of my time.
One night Aaron’s sister, Sarah, came out for dinner, and afterward she and I sat at the table—me with my cookbooks and some hot-off-the-letterpress canning labels, her with her knitting—while Aaron knocked away at his carving in the studio, a few feet away, the whacks of the mallet echoing off the tall log walls. He was playing an old scratchy classical record on his hand-cranked 78 player, and every ten minutes he stopped to flip it over.
“So is this what you guys are doing out here?” she asked bluntly, but without judgment. She was getting ready to leave for the Peace Corps in Latvia, to enter her own rural stopped time. Like us, she was deep into the cultural pastimes of two or three generations previous.
I looked at the table covered with opened books scratched up with notes and the labels I’d painstakingly stamped out for my latest batch of blueberry jam, all six precious half-pints of it.
“This is pretty much it,” I admitted, suddenly feeling like I should have been doing something even marginally as ambitious as she was.
“No, no, no!” she backpedaled. “It’s nice. Kinda feels ‘cultural’ out here.”
“Cities,” Aaron said, ashing off his cigar, “collect culture, but it all begins in the country.”
We laughed out loud because we all knew that he was full of shit, including him, and topped off our shot glasses of sherry, because for a few blooming seconds we wanted to believe it.
—