High Flying

The lady in the theatre stopped me and said, "Your sister is so amazing."

I went to Boston this week to watch my sister in her play at Wheelock Family Theatre, Charlotte's Web.  And Holy Hammer in Hicksville, she is awesome.  The play is amazing, and the whole cast grabs you and doesn't let you go for the whole ride.  Templeton is snarky spectacle in her pure rattiness.  Wilbur is humble and radiant.  The goose and gander make me laugh every time they are on stage.  The baby spiders are ridiculously cute...

Gary Ng took incredible shots of Charlotte and Wilbur.

But the woman was right.  The high flying Caroline Lawton is amazing.  Her aerial maneuvers display an incredible strength and show off her dedication to learning new things - she just started circus school a few months ago when she was cast.  And she is mesmerizing - you simply can't take your eyes off of her when she is on the set.

But the performance was not what the woman stopped me to talk about. She continued:

"Your sister is so kind on set.  She has really just set the tone for the whole play, of one of kindness, and the way that she has been with my daughter...."

The woman looked away to giver herself a moment to gain control of her voice again.  "Caroline has been so wonderful to all of the kids.  Your sister is amazing."

The play Charlotte's Web is about what it means to be a friend.  What it means to go from thinking only about yourself to thinking about the needs and wants of somebody else, and figuring out how you can help them.  The theme, woven throughout the script, is of selfishness versus selflessness.  Charlotte embodies the latter characteristic, and Caroline inhabits that part of the character completely, both onstage and off. 

The moment of triumph in the show for Charlotte is not the moment in which she saves Wilbur's bacon (#sorrynotsorry), but the moment when Wilbur comes to the realization that he needs to look for ways that he can be nice to others. When the gift of received friendship causes someone to move outside of self interest and find ways of doing something for others - that is the climax of the story.

How often do we do that?  Not me.  I am focused on getting my memo through the bureaucratic hoops.  I am worried about my Wednesday briefing, and how I am going to survive the next week of meetings?  I am aggravated about the paperwork, frantic over the emails, concerned about how overwhelmed I am feeling....

I.  Me.  My.

What if my focus instead were on the people around me?  What if I looked to see what Jenny is struggling with, and acted out of kindness, instead of just looking to use her to get my projects done? What if I stopped by to talk - really talk - with Brenda, instead of only leaving my desk to deal with the crisis at hand, exploding with anger that yet another memo had been hijacked and delayed?

What if I practice kindness?

I want to be amazing.  Just like my sister.

Granddaddy's Fig Preserves

Thirty seconds ago, I heard the lid pop into place on a jelly jar filled with warm fig preserves. Looking over to the backlit jars, I can just barely make out the thin slices of pale lemon rind, candied through the process, interspersed throughout the jar.  Nostalgia that hits so hard, I can, literally, taste it.

Thirty five years ago I helped my Grandaddy Lawton for a week during the early summer.  I dug up beds for his jonquils and built gravel 'thank-you-ma'am's' along his driveway.  And I helped him with his canning.  Summer canning on Lawton Mountain was a magical thing. Grandaddy took bushels of green beans and made pyramids of quarts of canned beans.  Bushels of sweet corn yielded mason jars filled with corn for all seven families.  Tomatoes became canned tomato juice - the basis of many a Bloody Mary - although that was NEVER their intent.  Baptists, after all, never intend to make their mixers. And they made jelly and preserves.

Grandaddy and Grandmama both had lived through the Depression, and it marked them.  They were frugal, and they used things until they needed fixing, and then they fixed them.  They did not buy extra stuff just because it was available; it was a way of life that didn't dispose of things just because they got old. 

Canning was a big part of their frugality, and their way of life.  The House in the Mountains (that was the only name I ever heard it called - never abbreviated or shortened) was the site of monumental canning efforts that extended from late spring throughout the summer, and the results were labeled and set in OCD-compliant rows in the pantry.

But the two jewels of the canning crown were the muscadine jelly and fig preserves.  Each teaspoon that was ever scooped from one of those jelly jars was liquid gold - and it was rationed out as such by the miserly jelly-bean counters in my household.  Because once it was gone, it was gone forever.  Until next season.

And one year, thirty five years ago, I got to help Grandaddy make the fig preserves.

The cutting of the stems from thee figs.  The slicing of the lemon.  The cooking of huge vats of figs, sugar, lemon and water, until all that was left was the citrus aroma, and the liquid gold of reduced figs.  Ladling the syrup into jars, licking fingers sticky with sap. A little nibble of the lemon rind in between efforts.  Into the pressure cooker, watching carefully to finish the canning process without blowing it all up.

And all throughout the process, the overwhelming smell of fig.

This weekend I took Kathe over to the grounds of my work, where a colleague of mine planted fig trees a decade or so ago.  They are now enormous trees, and in fifteen minutes we had collected a couple of gallons of figs. 

And I found a recipe that seemed very much like what my Granddaddy made (appended below, from this website).  And all afternoon, I got lost in the memory of working side by side with Granddaddy.

There are moments in life that speak to you.  For me, this was one. There is nothing like the flavor of goods canned in the home. Nothing that brings the memories back like leaning over the hot stove, stirring the pot to release the aroma-heavy steam. Even roadside stand canned goods, with all of their Mom&Pop labels and support-your-local-organic-farm caché cannot compare.

All afternoon, I labored over five pots of fig-related items.  Habanero-fig chutney, jalapeno-fig chutney, cardomom-fig jam, and a fig jam that ended up as a filling for fig newtons. (For the record, the newtons could have been submitted as a 'nailed it' pinterest fail, but they were SCRUMPTIOUS.)

And a few jars of the most glorious fig preserves ever.  Just like Granddaddy and I once made.

Bayou Woman's recipe.  See her online description here.

  

Cashews

Cashew apples.  One of the sweetest fruits on the planet.  Slight alum taste, but the juice would gush down your chin enough to make a SC peach jealous.

And as far as we were concerned, that was the only thing to do with them.  Eat the fruit, throw away the nut.  I mean, we remembered that expensive warped-peanut looking thing in the grocery store, and they were always the first item to go when the jar of mixed nuts were opened, but when we were in Brasil?  Nobody eats them.

But mom and dad asked the question anyway.  I mean, in a place where it grows wild, why are people who are living in poverty not supplementing their diet with easy, free protein? 

Turned out that the nut is poisonous. Muito perigoso.  Very dangerous.

Until it is roasted.

Roasting, as our predecessors on the river explained to us, is a tricky process, too.  Charles and Barbara Lawton (1st cousin, once removed) had tried it a year earlier.  Barbara had roasted them in the oven, and at the end of an hour roasting a pan of cashew nuts at 375 degrees, she opened the oven.

A poisonous steam shot out at her, making her face swell shut. For the next week, she could not open her eyes and her mouth and throat were raw from the superheated toxic steam.

So no oven-roasting for us.  My folks decided that the only way to do it was to make an outdoor fire, and roast them on the open fire.  Much better.

Now, O Best Beloved, in a jungle, keeping a fire going is tough work - 100% humidity is not conducive to campfires.  While I stayed my safe distance, Dad fed the fire, and mom turned the roasting cashews.  Both of them, inhaling smoke the whole time. 

The resulting rashes that they got were minimal, and I assume there was no real long-term effects from the inhalation of toxins.  But I do know that none of us ever thought that cashews were 'easy, free protein' ever again. 

And we always made sure to clean out the cashews from any party mix first off.  We know what kind of effort went into the prep.

Secret Place

When we lived in Brasil, Caroline and I had a little spot in the semi-circle that Lawton Madeiras Amazonias had carved out of the jungle - a corner of our very own.  It was at the far-upstream end of the cleared area, away from everything else. 

We called it the Secret Place.

The Secret Place was a small opening surrounded by trees.  It had a guava tree.  There were some banana trees in the middle of the clearing.  There was a strange citrus tree that produced inedible lemons the size of grapefruits (the leaves from that tree were used to make a tea that finally broke Caroline's fever during our first year there - our maid told mom about it, and in desperation, she tried it.).  There was a weird tree with fruit that looked like apples, and that could be used to make a pie that was almost completely unlike apple pie.  There was a cupuaḉu tree, a biribá tree (a soursop), and a guanabana tree. 

There was a ten-foot area that had frontage to the river, and there were almost always caymen - jacares - hanging out by the rivers edge.  These two- to three-foot alligator relatives were no threat, and they always ran away when we came near (meaning that we represented more of a threat.... but I never tasted one of those guys, so I am not sure whether they were even edible).

It was no secret.  It was barely a place.  But the Secret Place represented something magical to us.  It was a place where we could get away from the formalities of life - the school classes, the directed activities, the chores (OK, there weren't nearly as many chores as I seem to remember there being.) Mom knew if we were going there, and it was even subject to the occasional grasscutting by Jorge.

But it was a place where we could explore.  It was not safe in Olaria for an eight-year-old to wander in a lot of the places.  Much of the cleared area was wetland, and was unpleasant to wander through.  The uncleared area was off limits entirely.  So was the operational part of the lumberyard, while work was going on.  And the off-limits area extended to the airplane landing strip that had been cut into the jungle two years before (it had never been used, and there was almost no trace of where it had been clearcut).  But we were allowed to go unsupervised into the Secret Place, and check things out, look for fruit, and mostly just pretend we were explorers.

I now work in an office.  The work I do has consequences, and I am required to produce, to justify, to answer.  And I find myself needing a Secret Place, more than ever. Once in a great while, the lock on the stairwell to the roof will be inadvertantly left open.  I never miss a chance to go.  I love to try locked doors, whether at work or at church or.. well, anywhere.  See if there is a place that is not known.  Where I can escape for just a little bit.  To explore.  To pretend.  To get away.

And dream of sunning lizards on the edge of a sluggish Amazonian river, with electric blue butterflies swooping across the clearing.