Field of Bakers (belatedly)
Last week (was it just last week or longer ago…?) I scooted up to Bakersfield to visit family I hadn’t seen in nearly 10 years—whole heaps of aunts and cousins, with a great uncle thrown in for good measure, whose faces and positions in the tree had been distant and out of focus mere days before, so distant as to be nigh on irrelevent. It’s so strange to be thrust so intimately into the lives of people you know only vaguely, with the dim and haphazard remembrances of childhood.
It’s funny, too, how you get into the rhythm of a place—slow, dusty rose, wrapped close with memories of the dustbowl and everything after.
And what an everything after: Great Grandma R spoke off-handedly of all those rabbit cages draped with damp burlap against the heat, no mail delivery to Edison Highway, Well I told him, I’ll write you! I’m going to my mother’s. Would that we could all be so well preserved at 92, and tell such stories.
And she taught me to make noodles!
I was not-so-secretly delighted for her to say I was such a star pupil; I have hazy dream-like memories were of her laying them out and cutting them back on the dryer and not on that table, of peering up (I was so much shorter then, after all) and being shooed away from something of adult importance, of sacred, secret intent, a feeling of being in the way of creation. It was the shooing—not by Great Grandma R herself, but by others (my mother? Grandma?)—that birthed the mythical properties of those noodles. Yes, she makes them and cuts them herself. That was magic enough; the shooing confirmed that there were grown-up secrets withheld, in the incomprehensible way that grown-ups sometimes do. But now I have the noodleknowledge. (And a delicious knowledge it is.)
Rebecca asks later, “Noodles over mashed potatoes? What country is that from?”
“The Depression.”
“Ohhh. Right.”
I’ve come home with so many treasures—tangible and otherwise. I have the noodles, and stories, and ribbons from the LA County Fair-Rabbit Breeding Division, quilt ideas for my Ghana cloth, fabulous Old Lady jewelry from the 80s. It was a good visit.
