Love Is A Chest Freezer

When my parents meet, Dad is living in a van down by the river. What else does he need but a place to sleep and showers at the KOA camp? He is usually at work anyway.

When he proposes, Mom says not to waste money on an engagement ring. She asks for a chest freezer instead–a beige behemoth that purrs in a corner of Dad’s shop for most of my childhood.

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Mom’s garden is a jungle. Shadow and green–apple trees, plums, sunflowers, lettuce. Hollyhocks spear the clouds. Tomatoes warm in the sun. We uproot the garlic and hang it from the roof eaves to dry.

When the trees around town slump with ripe fruit, Dad takes my sister and me to different houses and offers to pick what they don’t want. We hunch over seeping fruit on the ground which we salvage into sauces.

Every year we pick apricots for the neighbour across the street. We spend days pitting apricots, making sauces, preserves, and pie filling for the freezer.

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I wake to the hum of the heater, snuggled under a pile of blankets on Grandma’s couch. The windows are dark.

Ham hisses in a cast iron pan under the stove light, breakfast for my dad and uncles headed into the hills before the sun rises. The men are quiet in the early morning, focused on eating. I watch them from my warm cocoon, the rest of the house still dreaming like the kittens curled in the wood box.

After breakfast, I follow Grandma outside, perch beside her in the pickup, cracked windshield beaded with repairs. Jostled by bumps in the field, faded yellow work gloves huge on my hands, my shoulders square with pride as I help throw hay for the cattle; Black Angus lowing to the surrounding fog, steam rising off their backs.

We let the chickens out of the coop. I fling dried corn from an old coffee can, dust of the feed on my hands. The chickens charge in indignant flurry; feathered jackhammers peck the ground.

In the dim light of the coop, I nudge my hand under the oldest hen’s stubborn feathers, fingers brushing a warm egg. She pins me with a warning side-eye but thankfully not with her beak. At least not today.

Eggs grumbling quietly in the coffee can, Grandma and I head to the garden, turn on the hose, water a quiet hiss to the soil. Grandma pulls a carrot from the dirt, scrubs it in the gurgling water. We both take a bite.

Crisp. Best carrot I will ever eat.

We mix bottles for the bummer lambs, chased away by their mothers, so we scoop formula from a can. The barn smells of last season’s hay and straw, dust motes jostling in a square of light. The lambs wag their swinging tails, butting the warm bottle in my hand.

We climb the hill back to the house, my steps two to Grandma’s one. She climbs the stairs first. I head to the shed, firewood cradled in my arms, patterns of bark flecks on my puffy coat. I stomp my boots clean in the mudroom before climbing the three steps to the kitchen.

I breathe deep. Grandma is baking blueberry muffins.

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As I grow from girl to woman, Dad buys Mom SO MANY RINGS. She wears rings on every finger, precious gems gleaming below every knuckle. He builds washboards of little pegs to hang the rest on the walls, their bedroom glittering with stones.

I couldn’t afford that engagement ring when we got married, he tells me.

Now I can.

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On our second Christmas together, my lover gifts me a pair of fuzzy yellow socks.

I am exclaiming how cute and comfortable they look when he manages a strangled, there’s something in the socks. 

I pause. I begin kneading my fingers down their length.

I find a circle of silver hidden in the toe.

Will you marry me? he asks as my dog leaps at the opportunity to slather a slobbering tongue across his face.

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At the house we save for years to buy, we have one small garden bed with a struggling rhubarb and a few strawberry plants the crows raid before any of us get to taste the fruit. I did not inherit my mother’s patience or green thumb, but when Wheeler’s gets a big shipment of surplus fruit, I buy $10 pallets of strawberries and can a bunch of jam like Grandma did every summer. I bring home 40 pound boxes of overripe bananas and spend days dehydrating banana chips like my husband’s mom used to do. I can multiple batches of Grandma’s recipe for zucchini relish, bake lemon zucchini bread and zucchini brownies gleaming with fudge frosting.

In the Fall, I buy frost-damaged apples from local farms, the house cozy with cinnamon as they collapse into sauce in the slow cooker. I forage fuzzy mullein for tea (good for coughs) and elderberries to make immunity-boosting syrup.

My whole life, food will feel like safety.

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Mom says, hand me that baby. 

You don’t need to keep feeding him. He’s just comfort nursing.

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Out the window vaguely prehistoric turkeys scout for windfall, heads down. Lines of feathered soldiers moving slow. Cautious.

In a mason jar on the front step, courting packets of peach tea blush, tags flicking like cow tails in the meadow by the creek where we fish for trout, sleek rainbows hovering the cool current at a loss for words. Marooned in the sagebrush, junipers hunch over swathes of moondust. Their branches trace patterns in the thirsty dirt as the sun summits a cloudless sky. Cattle huddle together in the shade, grumble about the state of the union.

We bring the trout home for dinner, shake them up a little, pepper them with questions, take everything they say with a grain of salt. Watch their love flour. They sizzle golden in the pan, flake with a fork.

Frogs and crickets croon comfort to the twilight. We toast the setting sun, listen to ice cubes tap at the glass.

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I email Mom.

The kids read this book about a bear and a duck eating nut pie and want to try it. Can I get your pecan pie recipe?

Her reply is cheerful. She sends the recipe, written by my great-grandmother. She’s happy she got her fishing licence. She has a doctor’s appointment about her stomach issues tomorrow. Maybe it’s an ulcer?

She says she will let me know how the appointment goes.

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The next day I get a text from Dad.

I don’t know how to tell you this…

It’s not an ulcer.

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Days later, Mom is gone.

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One morning, on a run with friends, my grief-numb heart decides it is time to shatter. I collapse to the ground, animal sob howling from my chest. I cry so hard one of my contacts pops out in the dirt.

In a different mood, I would laugh at how ridiculous this is.

One friend digs my contact from the dust and debris near the trail. Another supports my worthless legs as we hobble back toward the cars. I hunch into my stomach as though it has split a gaping hole, vomiting a slurry of saltwater and thawing ice at my friends’ startled feet. Back at the cars, they ask what I want to do.

I want to run.

So my friends rinse my contact with a water bottle. They restore my vision. Hands on my shoulders, solid on my back, they stand with me as I drag my chin up.

We run into the woods. Together.

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In the weeks that follow, the women I love cannot hold the pain for me.

What is there to say? What is there really to do?

They hold my shuddering shoulders as my tears dampen their shirts. They listen.

They fill my freezer.