Bread in The Bone

   My mother was born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth and spent most of her life in a sort of comfortable and casual denial. She displayed little in the way of entitlement or fancy, preferred worn out corduroys and moth-eaten sweaters to haute couture and was happier with the menagerie of orphaned animals in her life than most of the people she may have had to endure over cocktails or caviar. She enjoyed a bohemian education in Greenwich Village and Paris, subsidized by her father, of course, and became a remarkably fine painter despite that privilege.

   My father was born with the frigid, bitter spoon of rust-flecked iron from the shores of Lake Superior in his mouth. He grew through his Depression-era adolescence nurturing an overwhelming ambition to leave Duluth and surround himself with as much of the Main Line, Newport and Watch Hill hoi-polloi as he could possibly muster, the fancier the better. If his first improbable success was getting a full scholarship to Princeton; his crowning achievement was marrying the Governor's daughter.

    To the extent that we become our parents – and most of us reach a point where, despite our best efforts, we accept this as a fait accompli, – then it would be nice to think we absorb not just the bad or tiresome traits of our fathers or mothers but a more moderate stew that might include the sweet stuff as well. By the time the four of us came along, it's safe to say that some of the silver-plate had worn off the spoons in our own mouths, leaving beneath the wooden kitchen spoon, redolent of all the fabulous dishes of Rome and Paris, the gardens, orchards and vineyards of Provence and some pretty good guidance in the examples of our parents on how to go forward.

   While my brother and I hauled rocks out of the fields for twenty-five cents an hour to satisfy some God-forsaken vision of my father's we could not possibly imagine, my mother, followed by a passel of devoted livestock, would wire old bottles over the buds of fruit trees in the hope that the fruit would ripen inside. Dad planted orchards of peaches and pears, Mom pressed cider, made cheese, learned to use a scythe and took up the cello. Dad would eventually turn these fields, through dint of dark rage, Fitzcarraldian determination and back-breaking labor, into fifty or sixty acres of fine vineyard. Mom would cut down the bottles with lush pears inside and fill them with brandy made from a pressure cooker still and vats of sticky, pear mash.

  In the Autumn I'd take a group of friends up from the City to help with the grape harvest. We'd spread out in the rows early Saturday morning armed with snips and bushel baskets, methodically clipping solid, compact, heavy bunches of grapes the size of footballs and lowering them gently into the baskets amid the buzzing of thousands of harmless, drunken fruit wasps. We'd lug the stained and sticky baskets out to the head of the rows where Dad would drive the tractor up and down the lanes collecting them. Most of that variety might be picked by noon and we'd all trudge, exhausted and sore, down to the house for a massive luncheon of ham and quiches and cannelloni and garden salads and trout and cheeses and fresh, french bread and pear tarts and apple pies and gallons and gallons of cider, wine and potent Poire. All grown and raised and baked and fashioned, somehow, by my parents. This was always a mind-blowing experience for my city-mouse friends who, by four o'clock, would be draped over couches and chairs and sunny bits of lawn, full to the brim and fast asleep.

   This morning I made hot sauce out of the cherry and Anaheim peppers from our garden. I could have just gone up the hill and bought some hot sauce - probably better hot sauce -  if I'd really needed hot sauce. Which I don't. I've got a pear tree out there, too, which I keep forgetting to wire up with bottles in the spring because I'm too busy hauling rocks out of the garden or turning the hard, thawing soil in the beds. I've got jugs of raspberry and tarragon vinegars in the cupboard because I am genetically programmed to make these things every year. Somewhere I think I may have that still. I've got a brother who makes cheese, he can't help himself, and all four of us would almost rather cook than eat. In one way or another we have all been pursuing this thing, this stew, this style all our lives and have our parents - for better or worse – to thank for it. God only knows where they found the time for all of this and all of us.