The bitter scent of coming winter
I remember preparing a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.
Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get
crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi,
tucked among thick slices of potato. My
husband and I grow sage in our front yard.
The plant sits between the flat-leafed
parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver
green leaves upright, purple flowers still
drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon,
deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider
webs in preparation for the feasts and
sadness of fall.
Here is the original recipe, from
Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons
slivered sage in the last ten minutes of
cooking to recreate my more winter-scented
dish.
Roasted
Autumn Vegetables
1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and
trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut
into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired
In a bowl, toss together the potatoes,
quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the
dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper
to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled
large roasting pan and roast them in the
middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking
the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25
minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the
remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and
pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast
the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally,
for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are
tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the
vegetables with the thyme sprigs.
Gourmet
October 1990
Image: Attractive sage
bush, much nicer than ours, from
eHow.
Hello ... Columbus?
Capitol Plaza Apartments
The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was
cheap and within easy walking distance to
Union Station. On the first floor of an
eight-story building, it had a large window
overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in
view of surrounding structures. Small and
dark, with parquet floors and
“apartment-sized” appliances in the
not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave,
the right place to hide out for my final year
of college. I moved in August 1991.
To pay the bills, I took out more student
loans, got a better paying part-time job
working in a library at a high-profile law
firm. That’s where I met Chas.
Chas had recently divorced and was trying to
figure out his newly single life at 39, the
house gone, his routine changed. I was a
loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable
and shuttered, talking more to the homeless
men who bivouacked on my street than to my
fellow college students. We were both in love
with DC, with its high crime rate and crack
wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion
Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks,
the strange political celebrity, the feel of
it all: It was home.
Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early
1970s and headed straight for the District.
He would tell me stories of growing up the
city, where his large family lived in a
massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in
its blandness, the spread-out burg with the
solid architecture. “They just don’t make
houses here like they do in Columbus,” he
would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew
what he was talking about. Chas got his own
apartment at 16, a few years before he moved
to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from
parental supervision from the age of 14 or
so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another
concealed soul, self-protective and insular.
Most of our conversations took place on my
early evening library shifts where there was
no one else in the office to interrupt us. He
would discuss the pursuit of church ladies
(they were a tough bunch), explain his
theories on electromagnetic radiation, how
the destructive energy fields from power
lines were spreading cancer and causing
miscarriages. We would stare out the window
at the office building across the street,
watch the after hours workers work or not
work, watch them watching us. There was one
man who was always talking on the phone,
standing with his back to the full-length
window glass, earpiece pinned between head
and shoulder. It was a performance just for
us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the
air as though the person on the other end
would be persuaded by gesture. On the street
below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged
down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station
on the corner.
A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont
Circle.
I told Chas all about my former roommate
Martha, my escapes to visit her in
Chestertown, where our evenings at
Andy’s
were blurred
through multiple glasses of Dark and
Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum
and ginger beer; he’d get the details of
the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the
Irish Times or the Dubliner.
Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions
of barhops with Abe, an old friend from
Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor,
beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final
rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These
evenings generally ended in an argument over
something petty. We screamed across disco
lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs
in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do
it over again a month later.
In none of these conversations did I tell
Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the
Marines Martha and I dragged back from the
bar one night, about the make-out sessions
with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the
booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol
always uncovered the chasm, brought the need
for other people to the surface.
In between the pickups and the throw-ups and
the work and the studying, I’d occasionally
see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most
weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking
night?" the corner liquor store owner asked
me during one regular visit, to which I gave
a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write
papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night
movie on my crappy box of a television. The
Capitol Building was close to my apartment
and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at
night in all kinds of weather, braving
bracing November winds, floating through the
incredible sweetness of spring, when the
cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I
am alive, I am alive” I would think as I
walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling
the joy rise up in me).
The week before Martha drove me out to
Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and
I went out for one last round of beers, a
temporary goodbye. I had every intention of
returning to DC immediately after graduating
from library school. But then I met a guy who
got a job and we moved to a new town
together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build
a life, adopted some animals, and finally
bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick
Queen Anne in the Old Towne East
neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I
gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a
moment.
“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he
finally told me. Almost exactly across the
street from our new house was an empty lot,
the location of Chas’s childhood home.
Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never
had a flag up and the neighbor will have to
be a story for another day). Photo from
Old
Towne East Neighborhood
Association.
It was a strange coincidence. What were the
odds?
Writing prompt: Watch it!
The Metro is packed. The threatened end-of-day thunderstorms have arrived and I am jammed in with other hangdog federal workers, soaked tourists, and a crowd of high school students all wearing identical Smithsonian raincoats. I stare at a man’s hairy hand, thick gold ring on his index finger, as I hang on to the pole by the doors. We breathe in the heavy air, faint with adolescent sweat.
Picture from The Janus Museum.
As the warning chime rings and a disembodied voice tells us “Doors closing,” she walks in. I see her almost every day at Union Station sitting by the Christopher Columbus fountain behind a phalanx of plastic bags. “Got any money to spare today, baby?” she’ll ask. Before I encountered her there, she once sat next to me on the Metro, in one of those seats half hidden behind plexiglass at the back of the car.
She’s hard to forget, this middle-aged African American woman, probably homeless, maybe a little crazy. Every morning she gets up and puts make-up on her face, stripes of beige and dark tan, giving herself the face of a bland tiger. Her eyes are always hidden behind sunglasses. Today she wears a threadbare, stained trench coat, tan, stylishly cinched at the waist.
Commuters flatten themselves against daytrippers as the tiger woman forces her way into the car, except for man beside me. “Hey, you: watch it!” he yells. She ignores him, the doors close, and we’re on our way. Next stop, Judiciary Square.
Seven facts
Instead of passing it along, I offer it up to anyone who would like to participate.
7 FACTS about
Jennifer
1 - WORK: I was a reference
librarian for about ten years, first for a
state legislative agency, then for a
Washington, DC think tank, and finally for
the "world's greatest deliberative body."
Four years of working 40-50 hour weeks in a
basement paging through Congressional
Records, locating report language, and
watching C-SPAN with my colleagues for the
laughs led to disillusionment and burnout.
(Note: There is really much more to the job
than that, but an exhaustive listing of what
we did would bore most readers). I quit to go
to culinary school.
Took a detour to be a stay-at-home mother and
freelance writer.
2 - EDUCATION:
After one false start, I received a bachelors
in philosophy, a masters in library science,
and a certificate from a culinary school. My
first college experience was about drinking;
my second, about thinking, my third, about
getting a job, and my fourth about taking a
chance while I still could.
3 - FRIENDSHIP: When I do make a friend, it
is generally for life (even when I am not
good at keeping in touch). I’m still figuring
out how to make connections as a reserved
person without a traditional working life in
a place I don’t know very well, since we’re
still fairly new to Northern Californa. It
isn’t easy, but I am getting there. I don’t
need a posse, just a few confidants.
4 - RELATIONSHIPS: My second husband and I
have been married five years as of last
Saturday, and have been together for ten.
After a tough 2007, we’re in a good place
now. Happy belated anniversary, honey!
5 - WWW: The Internet was just taking off
when I was in graduate school. I remember
becoming quite engrossed in the usenet
groups. Gopher -- a kind of menu-driven WWW
-- was the hot technology during my first
library job. It’s a totally different world
now. Completely addictive, too, especially
now that I am blogging.
6 - FITNESS: Run 3x a week when I can, other
exercise on the off days, walk almost
everywhere. I’ve been mainly vegetarian (some
fish) for 13 years and don’t see going back
to eating meat.
7 - DREAMS: One basic dream: that I make an
authentic life as a writer. A better way to
put it: I am living an authentic life as a
writer, making the dream a reality. (Thank
you to The Fearless
Blog for cheerleading
the idea that we must think something to
make it so.)
Leaving on a jet plane ...
Since I can't bear to tear myself away from the blogosphere, I'm bringing my trusty laptop along. Hopefully I will have time to write other stuff, too, though that will be tough in a hotel room with little respite from watching the kid. I also want to work on a new layout for the blog. Naptime will be packed.
We'll be seeing my mother for the first time since last September. C is excited (this breaks my heart; even though they've had very little contact, he clearly loves her). I'm sure she is, too. I guess I am as well. If the air is clear and we're all feeling friendly and happy, the show will go off without a hitch. We will link arms and walk offstage, filled with warmth and love. If anyone's mind is clouded with worry or with things left unsaid, the performance will be off. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when it's over.
I'll let you know how it goes.