What A Stranger Taught Me

"Excuse me, little lady, do you have any scrap?"

As I pulled weeds from my very neglected alley garden, I looked up at these words and saw a pickup truck filled with metal of all kinds, and a muscled, stocky man covered in sweat. I thought for a few moments. Did I have any scrap? We had just rented a Dumpster and gotten rid of so much! But then I remembered, we still had the cast iron sink, original to our old house, sitting in the garage. It was worth some money as a vintage plumbing item, I knew. I offered it to him.

He hesitated. I bet he thought it was a stainless steel sink. But I opened the garage door and showed him. "That's worth something. I'll take it." He pointed out that the fittings were brass and the cast sink was "heavy scrap." I offered to help him load it into the truck—it had to weigh 200 pounds. But he dragged it and lifted it without much effort. Then he raised both arms over his head and exclaimed, "I'm goin' to the scrap yard!," with such enthusiasm I felt good about giving the sink to someone who needed it. We chatted for a while, and then I noticed he had old bike frames in the truck, too, and I had an old bike to get rid of. I had planned to donate it, but the brakes were shot and I didn't think I could donate something that was broken (Well, my husband thought that. I wasn't so sure.) 

When I showed him the bike, he immediately asked if I was sure I wanted to part with it. He could fix the brakes, he said, and give it to his daughter, who would love it since it was blue. Then I felt even more sure that I was doing the right thing. His whole face lit up as he told me how much his daughter would love it. I told him I'd had it since I was 11 or 12, and he said, "What are you now, 25?" Well, if I had been unsure that he was a nice guy, that sealed it. But as we talked some more, he revealed that he had worked in concrete and other heavy labor for 25 years and then had an accident that had taken out most of his neck, and he showed me a deep, disturbing scar on the back of his neck. I shuddered. He told me he still experienced phantom pain in his body, and that the painkillers he'd been taking had stopped working. He said this all in a conversational way, as if we were talking about the weather. He thanked me and proceeded to drive slowly through the alley, searching for more scrap. I knew I had just met a good person, and I felt good about helping in the small way that I was able. I also knew that I was damned lucky to have my health and my salary. I am also pretty lucky that I don't have to ask strangers for handouts. 

 I hope he made a killing at the scrap yard that day. 

Like the Ingalls Family, Only Not

There sure has been a lot of media coverage of home folks growing their own food this year, have you noticed? The New York Times has been a great source of both inspiration and frustration for me, as I read the many articles about people with tiny lots growing enough produce to sell at local markets. I long to eat zucchini and tomatoes and pole beans from my own yard, like we did when I was young and my grandparents had a large garden in the side yard. But for now, when I look into my own side yard I see two thriving pumpkin plants and two pitiful corn plants. It's late July, and our corn will be ready by about October. When we drive by fields full of corn taller than I am, I have to wonder when these farmers sowed their corn, given the cold and wet spring we had in Minnesota this year. I guess that's why we're not farmers: lack of know-how. 

Because I love the Little House books, I've been reading and rereading them since I was young. I am especially fond of the parts of these books that include descriptions of cooking and growing food. Ma made her own cottage cheese by scalding milk: this sounds like a recipe for a ruined pan and, possibly, a fire on the stove, were I to try this myself. In the spring, Laura and her family delighted in eating creamed potatoes and peas, tomatoes in sugar, and fresh lettuce dressed in vinegar and more sugar (which I also ate as a child, thanks to my Grandma). In the fall and winter months, they ate vinegar pie, green pumpkin pie, Hubbard squash—so rock-hard was this squash that Ma had to split them open with Pa's ax—and smoked meats. All this reading about providing for yourselves makes me wish I'd dug up a much larger piece of yard for a much larger garden. My son brought home a single bean plant that is now yielding slender, pale green beans. Would that we had planted a whole seed packet of these, I love green beans! My son, not so much, though, so I'd be able to enjoy them all by myself. 

Our neighbors have dug up most of their backyard and turned it into a garden. They share lettuce and tomatoes with us, and I'm always reminded of summertime at my grandparents' house in Cincinnati. My grandma grew up on a farm in Michigan, and she made delicious meals, some she called "concoctions." I wish I'd had an appreciation for all that she did in the kitchen while I was at her hip. I wish she'd taught me how to put up preserves. And I wish I'd inherited her cherry pitter, a heavy metal thing that clamped onto the edge of the countertop when we'd picked enough Bing cherries from her tree to bake a pie. Given that we had cherry pie for Thanksgiving, I have to wonder now, were those cherries that grew on her tree, and that she saved for the holiday? Did she make her own pie filling by making cherry preserves? I guess I'll just have to wonder.