What we choose to take

I’m sleeping on my best buddy’s couch, while the little green machine remains stuffed with everything I own five floors below in a parking garage in Vienna, Va.

Despite the fact that I’ve lived in D.C. before, have friends here, and know I will love it here – eventually, right now I feel like I just went from the Technicolor Oz to black and white Kansas. Except Oz is my home. I want to click my ruby slippers and go back. I miss the pink and yellow houses, the big, blue sky, the scarlet sunsets, and the lime-green margaritas. I’m also not used to everyone walking around looking so serious. And I haven’t seen one Guy Harvey T-shirt in days.

I’m disoriented.

The drive up was fine, except for the claustrophobia. My things were packed around me so tight I could barely move my arms.

I found, in a last-minute, last sweep of my apartment, a package of those massive overnight pads – the huge ones with wings -- each the size of a small duffel bag. I tossed them into the pile on back seat, and anytime I hit the brakes, one would go flying past my head like a missile wrapped for my protection.

I brought with me only things I decided I could not live without: clothes, bedding, towels, butterfly-shaped magazine rack, cowboy hat, yoga mat, wooden walking stick bought in Tanzania, blue and white teapot, magic wand, flat-screen TV, and jazz collection.

And, of course, the goblets.

My grandmother’s set of four, blue, Carnival Glass goblets have moved all over the world with me, since her death on October 31, 1993. I took them when my sister and I cleaned out her little green and white house.

They are a beautiful, iridescent blue, with a grape pattern stamped into the glass. My grandmother loved grapes. She liked the way the light kissed the small, purple globes. They are worth as little as $5 each on the Internet – so I won’t be taking them to Antiques Roadshow. But I doubt I would part with them at any price.

They’ve lived with me in Florida, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and London, England. I usually keep them in a rarely-used cabinet, fearing some sort of accidental tap will send them careening to the floor.

I love them so.

Once, I asked my mother if I should give them to my sister, since she is the one Grandma remembered. Not me. Grandma didn’t know me in the end. My sister has Grandma’s red hair, freckles, and profile, and was recognized as family. I look like my father.

My face became that of a stranger, just another thing – in the blurred tapestry of her life in its twilight – that confused her. Because I fixed her food and prepared warm water for her bath, she decided I was the maid.

It wasn’t always like that. When I was small and she was healthy, I was like a barnacle at her side, helping her plant tomatoes, admiring her sunflowers, watching her turn wild blackberries into homemade pie.

In her simple house, with its cheap, Corelle dinnerware and old, thrift store davenport, those goblets were one of her few luxuries, one of a handful of things she could hold to the light and watch sparkle.

One summer day when I had not yet reached the double-digits, she took them down from the cabinet where she kept them hidden, held them up toward the sun, and touched the grapes with a work-weary fingertip.

“Aren’t they pretty,” she said.

I looked at her eyes. I thought they were blue – as blue as the goblets -- but she said they were hazel. I watched her eyes sparkle alongside the glass.

“Yes, Grandma,” I said. “They are.”

Love and Vegetables

My grandmother’s fingertips always smelled like onions.

I think of this now, today, as I pluck a sweet vidalia from a basket at the farmer’s market. Its perfume settles into my nose and I feel a tug backward – as if all it would take was a small stumble, and I’d be back in her little green kitchen again.

I’ve been craving vegetables lately. I like the way the colors look lined up in my fridge, like a painter’s palette. And I like to think of myself as someone who knows what to do with food, a person with a favorite olive oil and expensive balsamic vinegar for special occasions.

But that’s not the way this romance started – me and vegetables.

My grandparents grew a hearty garden steps from their back door. Each summer we’d harvest corn, tomatoes, black eyes peas and speckled butter beans, all coaxed from the black Earth with the care and attention only old people seem to spare for the things they love.

This morning I circled the farmer’s market with a plastic green basket, choosing only the vegetables we used to grow. I picked up cucumbers, eggplant, green peppers, and squash, radishes, tomatoes and Silver Queen corn. I paid for them, brought them home in two bulging plastic bags – and laid them out on my counter.

That’s when I entered unchartered territory. Because I may talk a good food game -- but when the veggies hit the kitchen -- I’m a woman with two dozen cookbooks who can barely fry an egg.



I have witnesses, too. Last week my friend Marie had me over for dinner. She broiled lobster and served it with lemon butter, tossed greens with homemade dressing, and plopped a steaming ear of corn onto each of our plates.

I called her last week to ask how long she heated the corn.

"You are so country, Kelly," Marie said. "Here I made you lobster and all you can talk about is that damn corn."

"Well, the lobster was very good too," I said. "But I loved the corn."

Lobster is grown-up, which fork to use, what do you do for a living, who made your purse. Corn is childhood, slathered in butter, sprinkled with salt, eaten with sweet iced tea in your favorite pair of shorts.

Grandma and I ate corn for lunch every day with nothing more than sliced tomatoes, looking out over the tall sunflowers in her back yard.

Unlike me, she could cook anything, without guidance, without a recipe. She’d stand in a cloud of steam, over a big pot of vegetable soup, made with the bounty of her own hard work, mopping a sweaty brow because air conditioning was just for company.

Late one morning I rapped on her door with a sunburned fist and showed her a stretched and stained shirttail full of wild blackberries. And it didn’t amaze me then, as it would now, that by the time we’d finished dinner – she’d turned those blackberries into pie.


I peel the eggplant and begin to slice. I intend to wrestle it into a meal whether it likes it or not. I search my cook books, but am intimidated by the long lists of ingredients. I am craving simplicity. So, I toss the eggplant cubes with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. Then I spread them across a cookie sheet and bake at about 450 degrees for 30 minutes, or until the edges of the eggplant turn a pleasant brown.

I let the small, golden cubes cool, and then gingerly take a taste – pinching off an edge with my front teeth. I’m surprised. It’s edible. Simple -- just what I wanted.

Strive for simplicity when it comes to love and vegetables. Save the laborious steps. The energy is better spent committing it all to memory.

Cheers,
Kelly