by Amy Thielen
The winter light is that bright, so bright there’s no safe place to look.
—
Here’s the funny thing about going back to your hometown. You don’t just jump into the same old story. You step back into your shadow, but into a totally new narrative. You fold back the new page until it touches the old one, making a twin out of yourself, and then you have to walk around town like that, the old glued to the new. Mostly you forget about it, but then, every once in a while, you feel something flickering behind you, that jelly feeling of your former self.
I couldn’t have predicted it, because on the surface it defied common sense, but moving home had been in the cards for me for a long time—my stubborn nostalgia foreshadowed my path back. (And if Grandma Dion had ever dared to read my palm, she might have spotted it.)
My return has isolated the variables of my life in a valuable, almost scientific way. Standing in the same geographical spot, nearly twenty years later, I look at the landscape with new eyes. Only by freezing myself in place, I think, can I take an accurate measure.
It doesn’t escape me that only a native Minnesotan would think this.
I walk around town burrowed into my own head, gathering up memories with increasing affection, like it’s a pastime. On my way to the coffee shop, I see my dad driving past me at exactly 10:20, on his way to the post office to get the mail for the dealership, and I wave. He spots me through the windshield—in the way that all small-town residents look past the cars to their drivers—and waves back. I’m inflated with fondness and remind myself that when it comes to family relations, mundaneness is everything. The more insignificant the interaction, the better.
I drive down the wide Main Street, making a dramatic flip at the end of it to cruise back, this time not whipping the wheel like I would have in my youth but pulling out a smooth arc like an old-timer on a Sunday drive, taking it slow, because now I have a small boy in the backseat. And the boy is very hungry.
I never once thought, all the times when I was pregnant and glanced back at my unhatched imaginary kid in the backseat, that I’d ever drive that child through the fast-food drive-through window for a small order of fries, but now, in times of severe need, this is just what I do. I wryly remind myself that we do live, after all, in the fried-potato headquarters of the nation. French fries are a local food.
Through the haze of these thoughts, I make my way to the grocery store. When I pulled out my last bag of frozen smoked eggplant, I saw my freezer’s white bottom—the telltale sign of deep winter. My brother Marc must have liked the latest menu I’ve dropped on his answering machine—fancy meatloaf, more like pâté, shell beans with chive oil, an undetermined vegetable, and smoked eggplant baba ghanoush to start—because he’s left me a voicemail. As with everyone in my family, he and I express our affection through the menus. He’s coming to dinner tonight.
I unclick the child car seat harness and pull Hank to my hip. The Red Owl my mom frequented gave way more than ten years ago to a larger chain; the biggest local store is now called J&B Foods (so named after its proprietors, Jeff and Bob) and it is by and large my winter larder. Open twenty-four hours and as large as a suburban big-box store, this grocery store has both the interests of the budget-conscious (baked beans by the gallon) and the cooped-up gourmet cook (Medjool dates) in mind. It has an encyclopedic selection of dry goods like powdered milk and masa and pasta, and plenty of meat, but a pretty hit-or-miss produce department. For example, no bitter greens to speak of—although the green beans look like an embittered bunch. I beg the produce manager to stock shiitake mushrooms, promising to buy all of them if he brings them in.
The produce manager assumes I’ve imported my pickiness from New York City, but little does he know that it was steeped in me locally. I inherited it from my mom, and she from hers.
At the store I settle Hank into the seat of the grocery cart and roll through the aisles: through the produce where I wish they sold basil in a bouquet as they do in Brooklyn—even in the bodegas!—past the carrots and celery in plastic bags. After a summer of growing my own produce, they look like they’re suffocating in there. I dart down the middle aisles, weighing pounds against pennies as if I were living out my childhood dream of training for The Price Is Right. Out of gourmet habit, I grab panko ($3.99) instead of finer bread crumbs ($1.99) and bars of chocolate ($4.00 each) instead of semisweet chips ($2.43). I swallow thickly, knowing I should be more frugal, but what can I say? I cook with primary sources.
And yet my cart is nearly bereft of them. I’ve taken a full trip around the store and precious little has caught my fancy. The limits of food snobbery have been located, and they’re just as imperceptible as Margaret Sexton’s illusory property line. They lie, winking darkly at me, within my own borders. If I want to survive this winter, I’m going to need to get off my high horse and be a lot more resourceful.
I might as well embrace my Midwestern history full-throttle and adopt Grandma Dion’s sense of thrift. I remember the note she scrawled on the recipe card for caramel nut bars—very good, but expensive—and see that she’s right: whole walnuts are going for $14.99 a pound. I grab the cheaper walnut pieces at $2.99 a bag.
Steering in a wide circle back to the celery, I pick it up. Under the printed plastic, the lime-green stalks glow faintly, like vegetables in the garden do by twilight, cast into darkness but alive. I remember that time in the Cru kitchen when a line cook whined that he couldn’t make a vegetable for the family meal because all we had was celery and then had to stand by and watch Omae, the veteran Japanese fish cook, julienne the stalks and toss them with a brilliant, addictive, garlicky sesame dressing. That line cook was now me. I could remember that dressing. I could make that tomorrow. My current deprivation is a gift not to be wasted. I throw the bag onto the cart lattice.
At the meat cooler, I lean in and consider a chuck roast, sitting next to the bulkhead display of shiny, plastic-wrapped red ground beef tiles. I plan to cut the chuck roast into cubes and grind it at home—my meatloaf will be so much lighter with the freshly ground. I’ll cover it with an overlapping weave of blanched cabbage leaves. I throw this idea by Hank, who replies with a languorous yawn, and then I think to myself: This is crazy. It’s more expensive, takes more time, and this day is already running out. Jesus Christ, just buy the preground.
As I drop the square red package in my cart, I can almost hear a crack of lightning sounding in the meat aisle as I am promptly returned back to earth. I have reentered the atmosphere of home cooking.
But I am shocked back into childhood at the exit: the tremulous sound that my full grocery cart makes as I push it across the hard, molded-ice-ribbed parking lot to my car strikes me as powerfully familiar. What strength it took for my mother to propel this thing across the same corduroy ice road! It’s like pushing a grocery cart across the surface of Pluto. I look at Hank and he’s giving me one of those bottomless baby smiles that seep up from the deep. Sitting in the cart hopper in the burning cold air, his tiny face exposed, he starts to sing. The faster I push my cart, the louder he sings and the harder he laughs, his cheeks high and flaming pink in the icy wind. He opens his mouth wide and allows the corrugated bumps to drag out a low washboard melody, thrilled with our new landscape, our new chores, our new life.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is memoir, meaning that the facts and events stand on the old creaky chair legs of memory. In fact, I’d say that writing this book involved a careful readjustment of every false assumption I held about my own history.
Piecing together my past, especially after Mr. Wanderlust pulled up in his 1973 Buick hardtop, was a job for a historian more skilled than I—and I can’t even use old age as an excuse. Aaron and I moved often enough in our early years to make an editor’s head spin. Going back to my journals, I discovered that the year 1997 alone seemed to contain eight seasons rather than four, each with its own adventures, some of which—including the time I almost started a restaurant with a hippie couple fro
m Park Rapids—were cut because they clogged up the greater narrative flow.
I compressed a couple of summer gardening seasons into one, mostly out of concern for the reader’s patience for consecutive dim nights of non-electric living. I changed a few names out of respect for individuals’ privacy. I reconstructed dialogue, but only when I remembered complete phrases with total clarity and when the entire full-bloom conversation felt true to its real-life characters.
Those creative licenses aside, this account of my life is as true as I remember it—which is to say, a lot more loyal to time and fact than my old prememoir memory would have had it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Endless gratitude goes to Janis Donnaud, the fiercest, warmest, and most diligent agent around, for envisioning this book before I did, and for caring enough about it—and me—to push-prod it onward.
Thanks to Peter Gethers, whose sharp mind helped me wrangle my life story into a tangible shape, and whose optimism gave me courage.
Thanks to Chelsey Johnson, my first best friend, who has read my stories since the third grade and read this one tirelessly, with great care, thoughout its many versions…I’m grateful for her writing mentorship and thank her for her consistently fine cheerleading. (Go, PR.)
Enormous thanks to my editor, Rica Allannic, for her astute observations, shrewd sentence-whipping, and generous extensions. Special thanks to everyone at Clarkson Potter for their continued faith in this book, especially Doris Cooper, Erica Gelbard, Stephanie Huntwork, Phillip Leung, Christine Tanigawa, Jennifer Wang, and Stephanie Davis.
Thanks to Sara Woster, Mimi Lipson, Julie Caniglia, and Eric Thomason for reading early drafts.
Thanks to Bruce Brummitt and Cheryl Valois for letting me write in their idyllic forest hut, where I could pump water by hand again.
Thanks to my family: to my mom, Karen, for forever standing at the stove and telling me the stories, and then later lending me her vacated house in which to write them down; to my dad, Ted, and his wife, Mary, for their never-ending support; to my brothers, for agreeing to be in this book and for trusting me with our shared history; to the Spanglers, for giving me a second home.
Many thanks to Aaron, the hardened dreamer with the soft heart and the liquid voice, for building us a life, and for keeping the fires going.
Finally, thanks to Hank for teaching me that one’s appetite can be insatiable and picky at the same time…if I could bronze your discerning little palate along with your baby shoes, I would.
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