My father was a fisherman. Our childhood photo albums are filled with photos of him wearing either very short shorts and Hawaiian shirts, or Speedo-style bathing suits and tight T-shirts, late ‘80s style. He’s often doing something ocean related: fishing, mending nets, working on fish traps, or wrangling lobsters. Some of my early childhood memories include morning calls to him on the CB radio while my sister and I got ready for school. His call name was Froggy (he was French) and my mother’s was Big Tuna (my mother’s a tall woman, and a great catch!—though I’m not sure either of those things were related to her call name). There were no cell phones in the those days (what a blessing that was) and the CB was the only way to communicate with Dad during his long hours at sea.
We always begged him to take us on the boat. Occasionally, he did. I remember the rocking, the sun, and the smells. Diesel and fish. Salt. Sunscreen. The call of seagulls trailing us as he picked just the right spot. In 5-gallon buckets Dad would mix blood and guts with sand. When the consistency was just right, he’d toss the whole mess overboard. The bloody cloud attracted the fish, the bits of flesh drawing them closer to the surface. We fished with hooks and line on a spool, with lead sinkers Dad shaped by hand on our gas stove. I never touched a fishing pole until my mid 20s. I don’t know if my dad ever used one. In those days we would pull up hinds and grouper, yellowtail snapper and bony squirrelfish. My sister loved fishing then, and still loves fishing now. In hindsight, those outings are something I hold dear, though I can’t remember enjoying them much at the time. I was never a strong fisherwoman, and I’d rather clean and gut and eat the fish than spend hours waiting to catch them.
In addition to fishing full-time, my parents also owned a restaurant on a quiet bay, where they slaved away while my sister and I ran wild with the other neighborhood kids. We had a lot of freedom and could disappear for hours along the shores or in the coconut grove without the adults ever worrying about our whereabouts. We foraged whatever fruits were in season, built palm-frond huts, played mermaids, and jumped off whatever rocks or private docks we could sneak onto. Our parents grew up under similar circumstances and they knew we’d find our way back if we need help, food, or parental intervention in our games. It was a wonderful way to grow up, and looking back I’m grateful we had so much independence.
The restaurant played a central and grounding role in my childhood. It was our family’s livelihood and my father’s dream. After he died, my mother had to take over the restaurant management and in the years that followed she fought tooth and claw to salvage something of our inheritance from a business partners who turned out not to be trustworthy. In our teenage years, my sister and I had to pitch in after school, cleaning and setting up the dining room, folding napkins into fancy shapes, drying and polishing silverware, before sitting down to family meal with the staff before dinner service.
The summer of my 14th year, my mom cut her foot open on a shard of pipe in our backyard and had to get stitches along the entire arch of her foot. She couldn’t work and told me I’d have to fill in for her until she could walk again. I was, and remain, a shy person. Even though a part of me felt flattered that she trusted me with serving customers in our family business, she didn’t really have a choice, and I mostly hated the attention. Like any new server, I made endless mistakes with customers’ orders, and embarrassed myself many times over. It nevertheless became an important experience, and marked in a very specific way, the end of my childhood. I will always be grateful to the chefs and my cousin (the other server) who were so patient and gently teasing, and for the customers who took pity on me and usually tipped well. I managed to never spill wine on anyone, though I never succeeded in remembering to bring bread to my tables either.
One of the things I never expected to see again, after we sold the restaurant and all of its contents in 2004, was the glassware I spent so many hours washing and drying and putting away during the course of my childhood. The weight, and heft of each type of glass is engraved in my body’s memory and picking one up transports me instantly back in time. My father and his business partner opened the restaurant in 1984. My mother visited him shortly after, and I came along in 1985. We sold the restaurant in 2004, and during all those years, the glassware stayed the same. It is iconic and holds very strong associations for me.
About a month ago, while Honey and I were perusing glassware at a thrift store, I found a single wine glass in the Libbey Chivalry series in clear. It’s a glass I’ve held in hand thousands of times. It reminded me instantly of my dad, the restaurant, the years of running in and out of the bar and dining room and of getting yelled at for it, to our customer’s amusement (or lack thereof). So I bought it. At a second thrift store a few minutes later, I found the iced tea glass and the cordial glass from the same series. So I bought those, too. I never liked this glassware, but infused with the power to evoke so many memories, they have become very precious to me. They showed up in a way that could be seen as either random or miraculous and that feels, at times, like a greeting from my father from beyond the veil.
There are so many ways grief shadows us in the years that follow the loss of a loved one. At times, you go days or weeks not thinking about the person. At other times, any mention of them has you sobbing over all of the experiences you never got to share with them, or the things you never got to say. This fades a bit as the years pass, but it never fully disappears. My father has been dead 27 years, and I’ve spent almost a third of my life without him. I will never have gotten to share a single adult experience with him in the flesh, though he has shown up in my life in unexpected ways, even after his death. These thrifted Libbey glasses are one such example. I view them as a welcoming, a small sign that I’m in the right place, on the right path, and that he is with me still, after all these years and all these many meandering miles.
Since we’ve moved out of our 16’ x 6’ camper into our slightly larger apartment, we’ve started a gentle accumulation of things. We bought a couch, and some chairs, a kitchen table, and a small stand for my growing collection of plants. After so much time spent with few possessions, each addition feels delicious, almost transgressive, and we are taking the time to buy things that call to us in some way. Last weekend we picked up the gorgeous blue captain’s chair pictured above and every time I look at it, or sit in it, I feel a sweet upswelling of joy.
With more space, I’m also able to return to the kind of kitchen projects I’ve grown to love over the years, like fermenting veggies and brewing kombucha. With reliable access to good raw milk, I’ve ventured into making my own kefir (this was not without challenges) and thanks toDavid Asher’s brilliant book, The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, I’m starting to dabble in cheesemaking. As I write, I’ve got his recipe for St. Marcellin cheese aging in our repurposed mini wine cooler and I’m wavering between making a second batch or trying out one of his rennet curd cheeses. I’m always caught between trying something new and perfecting something tried.
Before finding Asher’s book, I tried my hand at making mozzarella from a kit I ordered online a few weeks ago. I read the instruction manual, reread the steps many times (becoming more confused with each read), watched several YouTube tutorials to get a better sense of the process and managed to not only make the vilest ball of chewy cud ever known to man, but also to frustrate myself entirely out of a second attempt. It made no sense to me that people throughout the world would subject themselves to such torture for the past several millenia. I knew there had to be a better, simpler, and more intuitive way to make cheese, else the farmwives and dairymen of old would simply never have bothered.
I don’t know how I came across Asher’s book, but it is exactly what I was looking for and is an absolute joy to read. He writes simply, his recipes and methods are straightforward, and the entire project feels extremely accessible. Some snippets of his introduction follow:
Not being one to blindly follow the standard path, I set out to teach myself a traditional approach to cheesemaking.
[…]
I now practice a cheesemaking inspired by the principles of ecology, biodynamics, and organic farming; it is a cheesemaking that’s influenced by traditional methods of fermentation through which I preserve all my other foods; and a cheesemaking that’s not in conflict with the simple and noncommercial manner in which I live my life. I now work with nature, rather than against nature, to make cheese.
[…]
North America does not have a healthy cheesemaking culture. Our modern methods of cheesemaking are based on fear: fear of raw milk, fear of foreign bacteria, and fear of fungi. Our milk is mistreated and mistrusted; it is stripped of its life through pasteurization, and monocultured strains of laboratory-raised commercial cultures are added to replace its native cultures in an attempt to create a more controlled, predictable, and presumably safer cheesemaking.
In reading his account, I realized how many parallels exist between modern cheesemaking and industrial monoculture farming. We apply the same destructive principles at all scales and it’s no wonder this generation of modern humans is the sickest and least healthy to ever walk the earth. Our reliance on industry to grow, process, package, and provide our food leaves us in a net deficit of healthy, nutrient dense foods. We have to reconnect to farmers, re-engage with our kitchens and relearn how to cook real foods before convenience wrecks even more havoc with our health.
One of the many goals we have to connect with our new environment is to learn what plants can be foraged for food, medicines, dyes, etc. A customer at the nursery last week told me about serviceberries, which are in season now, and explained where I could find some on public land. During a casual walk around the grounds of our apartment complex I discovered a mulberry tree loaded with the sweetest mulberries I’ve ever tasted. I processed those into a tasty mulberry simple syrup. Until we’re able to have a garden of our own, these finds enrich our connection to the land, whether we seek them out with purpose, or stumble upon them fortuitously.
We’ve got some foraging adventures planned for later this month with the Ozark Natural Science Center and I just picked up Foraging the Ozarks, whose author sometimes runs workshops in NWA. There are so many exciting things on this new horizon!