Gardening with Mary: Rebirth of a Northside Garden

by Carolyn Bastick

                           Dedicated to my beloved sons, Adam and Harry

Mary was the previous owner of my new Minneapolis home. I learned she had died that autumn, only sixty-nine, taken quickly by cancer. She was a gardener. An Army photographer. Her photograph filing cases (disappointingly empty) were to be left in the basement, too heavy to move. I was happy to allow them to remain in my keeping.

My move to this new home in 2017 was not planned. I was not supposed to be in Minnesota. The daughter of a British Army officer accustomed to the upheaval of military life, back in 1981 I had barely given a thought to the consequences of marrying an American and moving to the Twin Cities. Yet for over thirty-five years, I held England close to my heart, waiting for the day I could return.

And finally, it was time. As I prepared for this long-awaited repatriation, the father of my children assured me he approved of my departure. His doctor had declared him to be a veritable poster child for chemotherapy, surely, the ultimate positive prognosis. “Go to England, I’m fine!” he told me.

So, I went. With his perceived blessing. I did not understand then that his words were the hubris of a dying man. I had trusted him in this weighty matter because I had no choice. For to doubt him would be to accept the unacceptable—that my children would be left fatherless. That I would no longer simply be a divorced mother, but a single parent, with sole proprietorship of our boys as they stood poised on the brink of adulthood. Even after the divorce, we had raised our children collaboratively, equally involved in their lives. I could not imagine taking on this great responsibility alone.

Now, less than twenty-four months later, his death had brought me back to Minnesota in a rush. Even with my training, two transatlantic moves in as many years was brutal. A decision that had been in the making for over three decades was undone in a heartbeat. I deserted my partner and my English family to be close to my grieving sons. Insecure and isolated in this unfamiliar single parent role, I would need to create yet another American home. I would have one more northern garden to nurture.

My first foray into gardening came decades before after we bought a very special bungalow in Minneapolis in which to raise our family; a neglected 1917 Sear's kit house charmingly called The Ashmore. Learning about its history and attempting to restore some of its grandeur rapidly became an obsession.

The Ashmore was built in the Craftsman style. It possessed an organic nature. Brown hues, low to the ground, a chimney and garage constructed of field stone. It sat nestled in its urban lot begging to be surrounded by beauty. I believe it was the blandness of The Ashmore’s landscaping that spurred me on to take the plunge. Move that hosta. Dig out the soulless rows of shrubs, eradicate the plastic edging and weed control mesh. Make inroads into the lawn. I never looked back.

Americans, in my experience, hold this charming belief that if you are English and you create a garden that is pleasing to the eye, it is due solely to your heritage that it grows as it does. As if gardening is in the English DNA. I wish it were so!

Everything I know about gardening I have learned in Minnesota. Through trial and error and an unhesitating approach to moving plants. During my brief tenure in England, finally in a climate where I could grow year-round, I struggled in every respect. The garden centers, replete with their expansive gift shops and tea rooms, displayed rows and rows of sumptuously eye-watering plants and shrubs. I recognized virtually none of them. The English universally use botanical plant names. Common names, when applied, are frequently entirely different than those used in the States.

It took me months to understand that there was a reason why local retailers only offered a few varieties of daylily (my favorite plant.) I discovered to my horror that without being able to depend upon extended periods of hot weather, they were unreliable bloomers. One of my greatest joys starting in early summer is to rise at first light and see which of my lovelies have opened overnight. I greet them like old friends, exclaim at their beauty, then deadhead their spent compadres. Extraordinarily therapeutic, I could hardly bear the idea that this ritual was not going to be available to me in my long-awaited English garden.

And while hosta love the English climate, so do slugs and snails. They would decimate complete plants overnight. Eventually, I just gave up on another of my once-dependable garden companions.

The old adage "the grass is always greener on the other side" could not have been more apt!

So, on a bitterly cold January day when I found myself viewing what was to become my next home, the garden not at all apparent under the snow and ice, my heavy heart was lifted by a single thought: I can once again garden like a Minnesotan!

Mine was the sole offer despite a strong seller’s market, the discounted asking price, and that the property sat directly across from Folwell Park. Observed from the right angle, you could believe the park was an extension of the garden. I found this irresistible. It was as if this place had been waiting just for me. Because I desperately needed somewhere to call my own. Because I could see beyond the achingly sad shabbiness of this 1925 bungalow. Because I am a gardener.

My new home was located in north Minneapolis. When I first moved to the Twin Cities, I learned to navigate this foreign land thusly: North was bad. Always. South was good. Always. West was affluent suburbia where I could ride horses. East was the direction of travel required to get to our twin, St. Paul.

I bucked the system early and moved into neighborhoods that alarmed everyone within my newly-acquired social circle. I made money every time I sold a house. Gentrification was my friend. You will hear gunshots every night said a young cop I consulted prior to making my latest home-buying decision. I went ahead with the purchase anyway; gunfire was no match for my track record.

He was right. Calling 911 has become integral to my lifestyle. In the beginning, I called often out of sheer disbelief at the crimes and various wrongs unfolding in front of my white privileged eyes. Now, I am more likely to call out of anger and outrage. I have developed a set of 911-worthy standards. If drug dealers are selling to adults, moving on quickly, I am inclined to give them a pass. But the guy terrifyingly tearing down the street on the illegal 4-wheeler turns me into a crazy woman, and on principle I pick up my phone.

I confess that, sometimes, I have left it to others to react when gunshots stutter out in the middle of the night. I worry that I will fall prey to the complacency and cynicism that infects many of my neighbors. Fear and distrust of local law enforcement is deeply rooted here on the Northside. I am almost relieved when another event triggers the now-familiar heady cocktail of fear, fury, and desire to right a wrong and I reach for that phone.

It was a wimpy winter by Minnesota standards. The snow was gone by March and the thaw revealed the true extent of the neglect that I had inherited. Like the Sear’s kit house, it was clear I was going to have to engage in a little digging and destruction to rejuvenate Mary’s little house. Yards and yards of odd little retaining walls, now tipping over in all directions, had to be removed. As did the business end of an ancient washing line that was serving as a bird feeder rack. A non-functioning Narnia light was randomly placed where I could envision a flower bed.

Then I waited.

Spring stampedes into Minnesota—a wonder to behold if you have lived through one of these winters. Even after gardening here for over two decades, I am amazed that anything survives the depth of the deep freeze. Yet once all danger of snow has passed, in a matter of weeks everything is covered in a haze of green. You become adept at identifying plants (and weeds) from the barest tuft of growth, the blessed relief and thrill when your beloved bits and pieces show signs of life.

But even as you are welcoming the return of your garden, Mother Nature is whispering in your ear ... Hurry, hurry! Waste not a minute. Come November, the snow will fly. All you hope to achieve must be accomplished in Minnesota’s short-lived growing season. Gardening in the Upper Midwest is an intense experience. For me, a powerful driving force.

That first spring, I confess I was especially excited as I waited to see Mary's garden. Mary was a gardener. Everyone told me so. In the meantime, I found some of her treasures scattered throughout the beds, stored in the garage and basement, many of them not to my taste. In the past, I would have rehoused these items. Yet now I did not. A pink Dollar Store kneeler has proved to be invaluable. A cracked garbage can is perfect for weeding as it tips neatly inside the requisite paper lawn bags. And buried deep under layers of decaying leaves I came across a stepping stone, orange and black koi swimming around its edges. It lives next to a newly-dug pond, much safer than the real thing who would almost certainly become midnight snacks for marauding raccoons.

This was the start of a fresh approach to making a garden. There were budgeting constraints. What could I recycle, re-purpose? To re-use Mary's leftovers in unexpected ways seemed both practical and respectful. It gave me permission to be more relaxed as I set about building something livable and lovely. My world had been turned upside down, the perfect time to break through those self-imposed creative barriers.

By May, I had a better feel for the garden itself. Frankly, I was disappointed.

There was much evidence that no-one had been picking up the litter that is endemic to the north side of Minneapolis. The primary bed was not full of whimsical plantings as the jaunty brick edging might suggest. Just some very ordinary hosta and phlox, a wire Easter egg basket thrown in for good measure. And a carpet of weeds and saplings from the street maples. The allium, though plentiful and most welcome in the spring, were jammed up against the back wall, their early-season impact lost in the shadow of the building. The "nice hedge" (so described by the uninspired Realtor selling the house) was pruned to within an inch of its life. In contrast, the one mature tree, a messy ash, was gasping for a trim, more dead than alive.

In front, a lonely hydrangea was parked in full sun on the edge of the inexplicably lumpy lawn, where it would attract the attention of local dogs and be bumped and bruised by pedestrians rounding the corner. I didn't understand how it could still be alive given its harsh positioning.

I tend to focus my attention on my more private back yard. But it was here, at the intersection of two less-than-desirable streets in North Minneapolis, that I unearthed where Mary had created her pièce de résistance. A single bed. A bed that would accumulate snow, salt and sand delivered by the City plows. That would suffer the most from accidental foot traffic. That would collect the worst of Folwell's trash. That would from time to time be driven over by cars under the influence of their reckless or impaired owners.

Nothing made sense. I could see the love that Mary had put into this one bed, but I struggled at first to comprehend why she might have selected this particular space for what appeared to be her primary gardening effort. Where was the work of the great gardener?

But then I reminded myself that Mary was sick. Perhaps she was too tired to tend to more than this small plot. Could this also have been a mark of defiance on her part? To demonstrate that you can create and sustain beauty anywhere? Even at a crossroad that far too often bears witness to human drama and chaos. Frequently loud. Occasionally violent.

Did she choose to cultivate here because, near the end, it took her out into the world and provided an opportunity to greet her neighbors? Have a natter. Observe the action on the street, good and bad. And hear how passersby appreciated her endeavors. "I love your flowers!" A beep of the horn, a smile and thumbs up from a total stranger. Because, I've learned, this is what happens when you are tending Mary's garden.

I have come to view this garden as a miracle of sorts. It has yielded many beautiful surprises and helped me become deeply connected with this sometime challenging neighborhood. Has sustained me through another difficult adjustment as an expat. It is our curse to forever be leaving precious people. This part never gets any easier. My gardens have always eased the pain. Have enabled me to create a sense of place when I was starting again.

It has been while tending Mary's flower bed that I have experienced the most uplifting of encounters. The most humbling, like the freely-given hugs from the little girls that catch the bus on my corner or the young boy who has blessed me with his inquisitive friendship, somehow rising above the mayhem of his cramped and noisy household where a man was shot and killed shortly before I arrived. For months, I naively assumed the deflated balloons hanging sadly from the tree on the curb were left over from a kid’s birthday celebration. Another neighbor unexpectedly pulled up his shirt to show me the tattooed landscape of his back: tigers, eagles, and flowers. Another nature lover. Our mutual love of the natural world couldn’t stop the jolt I felt when I spied the .44 Magnum tucked into his waist band. I marvel at the way a flower or visiting butterfly ensnares complete strangers in conversation about the wonders of our planet.

Something that seems unique to Northside living is how on the bleakest of days, when life on this street seems unutterably hard, someone will express gratitude for the beauty of my garden, and instantly the world is put to rights.

There is much need in this community, and I have been graced with many random opportunities to give to others. I have developed a reputation. I have scoured the ground for spent shells outside my window in the wake of gun-wielding truant teenagers fleeing from an unidentified assailant. I bullied the City into installing a four-way stop sign at my corner and shamed the Park Board into giving our neglected park the love it had so long deserved. This place has provided me with a job when I thought I had none.

  

I had been absolutely determined to transplant the poorly-placed hydrangea that first year, quite prepared to take the risk that it wouldn't live through such a move. But thankfully I ran out of time and energy. Because it is a stunner. Starting to bloom in June, it goes on and on, the blossoms spectacular and deliciously fragrant.

The hardy hydrangea is not alone in thriving where it should not. Hosta have been treated likewise, planted in full sun in thin soil, and in their resilience, they have spread through chinks in the brick edging, lending a delightfully haphazard effect to the planting.

I have never had a garden that attracts so many birds. The garden grows, seemingly, unbidden. Even the hosta self-seed. The allium planted under the overhangs of the roof get virtually no moisture. Yet when I dig them up, they reappear. A mystery rose has popped up in the same barren spot. Diminutive balloon flowers appear hither and thither in a stone-dry bed where I was sure nothing could flourish. It was here also that I found what I at first believed to be some sickly daylilies of the 'Stella de Oro' variety. I am not a fan of the color or the ever-blooming concept and dumped them unceremoniously in Mary's boulevard. This daylily is in fact a gorgeous creamy yellow. And tiny. Like the balloon flowers. Another near miss!

Mary's planting decisions seemed to defy gardening logic. There can be no other explanation: these plants bloom for Mary.

I have of course put my own stamp on the most recent of my northern gardens. I have planted many trees, some donated by public schemes seeking to reforest North Minneapolis following the devastation of the 2011 tornado. I have switched things up and further developed Mary’s riotous color scheme, just as I have made use of many of Mary's curiosities.

I gladly accept donations from friends and neighbors with which to fill my growing garden and am thankful for these living gifts. This is a marked departure from my former strict gardening self that would have turned down the likes of the previously-scorned Stella de Oro and the near-neon orange lilium, beautifully brash, that now brighten Mary's bed. These were a contribution from the .44 Magnum owner. These plants are tough, easy keepers, perfect for that dangerous boulevard.

As I dig and change, I have uncovered 20th century trash: Broken bottles, china shards, hardware, a tiny Cinderella slipper. I cherish this glimpse into the generations that called this corner home before my time. Before Mary's time. I save the best pieces and wonder about their owners. And when the day comes that I must leave here, they will accompany me on my travels. In memoriam.

I continue to hear that Mary was quite the gardener. She was very kind, generous, trusting. Maybe too trusting it has been suggested. Sometimes Mary was a little, well, eccentric: compulsively mowing the lumpy lawn, trimming that hedge. I am always grateful for these insights into the woman whose passing made my Northside life possible. And very often those who knew her ask the question: where is Mary now? I have to explain that Mary is gone. This has been an altogether unexpected responsibility. I observe their faces, see the shock and sadness, the little expressions of discomfort that they should have known. Mary was their neighbor.

How can this happen? Because this is Minnesota. The first frost drives us into a frenzy of preparation for the long cold months ahead. Then we hunker down for the winter. Children are conceived. People marry. Move away. Get sick. And die. In the spring, we venture outside and catch up. Quickly. For in just a few short months, the snow will fly.

Afterword

I have recently looked up Mary's obituary. I had resisted taking this step for fear that I would learn something that wouldn't mesh with how I understood her. Instead, I discovered a deeper connection. Mary was the sister of a man that I had worked alongside for a number of years. My former co-workers had attended Mary's funeral.

Importantly, I learned that my sense of Mary was not misplaced. She was a volunteer teacher’s assistant, loved children, was passionate about the arts. She was pretty.

I have come to feel an affinity and an affection for Mary. There is much we have shared beyond the plants that survived her. Ours is a story of two gardeners. And their Northside garden.

"There is something magical in sophisticating the elements into something livable, something human. It is as if you are building your own heart."

 –Harry Jensen, December 2018

Carolyn Bastick, British by birth and a naturalized American, was born in Hong Kong into a British Army generational family, survived the eccentricities and lack-luster education provided by the English boarding school system (a memoir she fully intends to write one day), and spent much of her adult life as an ex pat living in the States, raising a family, and working in the compliance world. She is a lapsed horsewoman and passionate self-taught gardener and has recently re-repatriated to England, where she is happily self-isolating with her fiancé in their large and unruly garden—finally learning how to be an English gardener.

Hot Work

by Joyce H. Munro

Music to cook by: “My Funny Valentine,” the Vedran Ružić Trio

I’m pretty sure I know how the fire started, though I can’t be certain. Newspaper reporters weren’t certain either. You can read evasion all over their conclusion: “The origin is supposed to have been a defective flue in the basement of the Riverside Hotel.” Defective flue, my eye. Something more combustible happened down in the basement that night in 1875.

Eight o’clock—closing time at Nat’s Oyster Saloon. Knowing Nat, he probably told his kitchen help to go home early, business was slow anyway. Then he stayed on alone to close up the place. His pride and joy. Recently opened in downtown Milton, Pennsylvania, on the lower level of his father’s new hotel. The place of resort for gents and ladies. Good square meals at reasonable prices. Best desserts in town. Fresh bivalves served in any style desired. Raw. Baked. Stewed. Scalloped. Fried.

If you’re like me, you eat your oysters on the half shell or fried. Forget chopped-up or soupy. My husband likes them fried, he, being from the south where frying is de rigueur. Ever since we moved to the Philly area, he’s been on the lookout for restaurants serving decent fried oysters, but there’s only one that meets the desires of his taste buds—the Oyster House in Center City. So on occasion, we have resorted to frying them up ourselves.

The recipe from Nat’s day calls for dipping oysters three times. First in cracker dust, then in beaten egg, then cracker dust again. Dipping is done with the fingers—piercing oysters with a fork destroys the flavor (so said cooks in those days). Then they’re laid in a wire basket and fried in a pot of lard so hot blue smoke rises from the center. It’s not a good idea for lard to boil unattended. But, knowing Nat, he was probably multitasking. And voila, the perfect ingredients for a block-buster fire.

I need to point out that Nat’s was not the only place where the fire of ’75 could have started. There were several oyster saloons in town where blue smoke rose over kettles of boiling lard. Oysters, once considered fancy food for fancy people, were all the rage, east to west, north to south. Good eating was the reward for hauling gobs of crude oil out of the depths of Pennsylvania. And newspapers, like the Sunbury American, carried recipes for good eats. They also reported tales of overeating. Like the one about an old lady who downed “two dozen fried oysters, a pound of crackers, three slices of fruit cake, half a mince pie and some apples, after which she was threatened with a spasm, and in the effort to prevent it, she sacrificed all the wine there was in the house.”

Oysters sped their way from the Chesapeake Bay to towns like Milton by railway. Bedded down in straw and moistened with salt water, oysters made the trip in only sixteen hours. An hour or so later, as fast as shuckers could shuck, they’d be sliding down the throats of gents sitting at counters all over town. Followed by a pint of cold lager beer. Knowing Nat, he probably kept his place open later than other establishments and wore himself out. Feet so sore, fingers so achy. So weary, he didn’t realize the fryer was still boiling away, crumbs from the last oysters popping into the air. Flash point—and poof!

The blaze that night was hungry enough to eat up a whole block of businesses. Nat wasn’t hurt, at least not bad enough to make the newspapers. But four years later, Nat did make the papers. Another fire. This one blew him out a window head first when flames licked at gas pipes. The papers dispassionately reported that he suffered a broken arm and contusions.

Here’s what happened. Nat was working at his restaurant and heard people yelling, Fire! He ran down the street and dashed into Brown’s building to help Gus Lochman save his confectionery shop. But while he was grabbing goodies off the shelves, he got tossed out unceremoniously. Brown’s, a frame structure on Front Street, was reduced to glowing embers. And the cause of the fire? The usual suspect—a defective flue.

Then in 1880, on a warm and windy day in May, fire erupted yet again, this time at Milton’s largest industry at the edge of town—the Car Works. And yet again, Nat’s restaurant burned to the ground, as did his father’s newly rebuilt hotel, his brother’s bakery, and his sister-in-law’s confectionery.

This was the fire of all fires, landing Milton on the list of largest conflagrations in North America. Residents saw their town burn from one end to the other. Their houses, businesses, schools, churches reduced to a blanket of ash six inches deep. Their just-planted vegetable gardens, shade trees where they carved their initials, canaries perched in gilded cages in their parlors. Tintypes of Granny and Pa-Pa. Letters from the battlefield back in the ‘60s. Marriage certificates. Lockets holding strands of their stillborn baby’s hair. Ashes of all that was sacred, blown about the streets, into the west branch of the Susquehanna River, floating down to the Chesapeake Bay, metamorphosing into food for oysters.

Nothing left to hold onto. Other things people held dear—like their emotions, their brains, muscles, immune systems—charred as well. As psychologists have told us, the trauma of massive destruction can lead to depression or long-term anxiety disorders or debilitating physical ailments. Some individuals never regain hold.

What happened to Miltonians that May day is similar to what happens to soldiers. It happened to Nat during the Civil War. Back in the spring of ’62, Nat’s regiment of the Pennsylvania Reserves, the Thirty-Fourth, was charged with protecting the nation’s capital at Fort Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. It was there that Nat saw—as up close and personal as a fort full of soldiers can get—President Lincoln and General McClellan, who came out to review the troops. McClellan was the bigger draw. He was a Pennsylvanian and how those soldiers loved him.

Nat’s regiment was ordered to Manassas, Virginia, then deeper south to Fredericksburg and on to Richmond, where they engaged in the Seven Days’ Battles and lost to the Confederates. Then up to Bull Run, then up farther to South Mountain, then over to Antietam. Then back down ... then up ... then over ... then down ... Along the way, the Reserves were picking up a reputation for their “magnificent and stubborn valor,” as McClellan put it. They were also picking up diarrhea, rheumatism, frostbite, typhoid fever.

At some point on the war path, after the battle of Antietam, when the regiment turned south again, Nathaniel Huth bolted. Emotionally or physically or both, he abandoned the cause and for that offense, he was dishonorably discharged by the General Courts-Martial in November of 1862. His motive for bolting will never be known, but it certainly didn’t help that McClellan, his beloved General-in-Chief, had just been ousted by Lincoln for not pursuing the enemy aggressively enough. The Reserves were fuming mad when they got word—they had sworn they would stand by him. Some of those reservists, no doubt, acted out that fall.

Nat was nineteen, stood five and a half feet, and, judging by his photo taken later in life, weighed a hundred pounds. Judging by that same photo, his slack-jawed, shell-shocked expression probably infuriated the court; they wanted to see loyalty and energy in that face. The charge against Nat was an action considered egregious, like falling asleep on post, vulgarity in the presence of a lady, gross intoxication, or insubordination.

Nat did not come home unscathed. He did not come home, period. After his discharge, he went west, just shy of the Ohio border, where he met and married Martha Jones of Portersville. But his heart and his livelihood were in Milton, so he hauled Martha, pregnant with the first of eleven children, back home where he could make the tasty morsels of his dreams.

One after another, when they were old enough to hoist themselves up and grip the cold marble slab with their fat fingers, and their eyes followed the rolling pin back and forth on the pastry table, that’s when Nat would have commenced his children’s education in cookery. Those round, rosy faces intent on kitchen work. Sieving, mixing, kneading. Their non-stop baby chatter. Rolling, greasing, grating. Could children have more fun than this? Mashing, spooning, tasting.

And one after another, Nat and Martha’s children took to cookery. All but four. Willie who died of scarlet fever. Ralph who died of spinal meningitis. Mattie, of diphtheria. Marian, cholera. And with each child’s death, the kitchen mourned. Lamentation falling in the stew pot, scooped into dishes served to customers who, unless they saw tears in Nat’s eyes when he served them, ate unknowing.

Father Huth and Mother Huth they were called after they moved to Brookville, Pennsylvania at the turn of the century. But what about Henry the earlier father and Catherine the earlier mother? All it took was migration up the Schuylkill River in the 1850s, then a couple of block-buster fires to lose track of begetters. Maybe Nat’s children asked him where great-granddad came from and all he knew was some place in Germany. Maybe they asked what their original name was and he said Hutt, Hoot, or Hott. Maybe they asked him to say something in German and all he knew was Sie lustigen kleinen dummen Kopf. Thus, the current elders became the only elders.

The skimpiest family tree I’ve ever heard of, penned on a scrap of paper and tucked in a Bible, reads in part: “Mother Huth’s father’s mother was ... Father Huth’s father’s name was ... Your great grandmother Huth’s name was ...”

No dates, no places, no stories. This is the whole of Father and Mother Huth’s family tree, a paper version of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree with six bedraggled branches. I learn about this scrap of paper during Christmastide, the season of gift-giving and feasting. Some gift, this sparse tree with its flimsy information.

Henry Huth’s descendents may not have talked much about their past, but they molded it out of spun sugar and fondant and marzipan. Huths were, and still are, bakers and confectioners. A family-wide, generations-long love affair with sweets. You can follow the scent of rum-laced fruitcake as Huths moved across Pennsylvania into Ohio, over to New Jersey, down to Washington, D.C., opening bakeries with trendy names like Vienna, Globe, Bon-Ton. And who knows how many Huths have baked in the privacy of their own kitchens, gluey-doughed fingers leaving prints all over cabinets in the search for nutmeg.

The recipe for Nat’s fruitcake, handwritten on a card, is tucked away in my recipe box. Every year around Christmas time, I get it out and I remember when my Dad baked hundreds of pounds of fruitcake each year. Yes, hundreds. Then came a deal to bake the cakes for Woodward & Lothrop Department Stores in Washington, D.C., until they learned Dad didn’t have a commercial kitchen license. Over the Christmas holidays, Dad and I emailed about fruitcake, not that I planned to bake any. But he reminded me of a few things anyway: “This is important—put a pan of water on the bottom of the oven, otherwise cake will be too dry. Use brown kraft paper for pan liner, but grease the pan too.”

And where did Dad learn these insider tips? From his Father Fred who learned from Father George who learned from Father Nathaniel who learned from Father Henry who learned from Father name unknown. It is rude to tell fruitcake jokes in my hearing—I have blood kinship with the stuff.

Nat’s fruitcake is the type that improves with time, though not as much time as fine wine. The recipe brought by memory from somewhere in Germany to Reading, Pennsylvania around 1819 and adapted through the generations, thanks to ever-more-convenient ingredients. Three types of raisins, plus currants and dates and figs and prunes. Pounds and pounds of candied fruit, walnuts, eggs, a minimal amount of flour. Nat must have used a wash basin, not a bowl. And it was a hands-on situation. Elbow-deep in batter. Then he’d plop it in pans and let it slow-bake for half a day. Along about fruitcake-mixing time each autumn, Nat’s growing children likely soured on kitchen work. But he wouldn’t let them bolt. Nat had rules for cooking and rules for children, which none dared break. Customers craved fruitcake—the baking must be done.

The ritziest Christmas gift I ever received was a “Little Lady” stove. A real electric stove for cooking real food. There it gleamed on Christmas morning, under the tree, surrounded by a pile of mini-sized accoutrements. Mixes for pie crust, gingerbread, pancakes, cookies. Pots and pans, cookie cutters, rolling pin. I cooked all the mixes in short order, one after the other, then scoured the kitchen for something else to make. Mom gave me dollops of left-overs to cook in my mini sauce pot, biscuits to reheat in the oven. My culinary education was well on the way when my brother decided to sauté something made of plastic directly on the stovetop. Then he satisfied his urge to bake using a model airplane. The oven didn’t actually catch fire, it just smoldered for the longest time after the babysitter yanked out the plug.

Nat got a new oven after he moved to Brookville, Pennsylvania and opened a bakery on Main Street. A modern oven that could hold a constant heat, perfect for crusty breads and delicate sweets. But when Nat hung out his shingle, he was dealing with stuff other than the sweet stuff. Three children and a daughter-in-law lived with him in the apartment above the bakery. Within a year, the daughter-in-law died in childbirth. That same year, a granddaughter was born blind. Two more granddaughters and a grandson died the following year. Knowing Nat, he bristled at small things, grumbled at kitchen help, punished the dough with his fists, ramming his wordless homage into yeast rolls, sold to customers who spread them with jam and ate unknowing.

Then his youngest daughter, Helen, and her husband moved in. Who knows what Nat thought when Helen married John Frazier, a newcomer, come to Brookville to establish a new industry—horse racing. I’m guessing Nat took John’s ambitions in stride, maybe went out to see that plot of level ground John wanted to buy and build horse stables, a race track, start a racing association. Nat didn’t invest in John’s schemes, but eventually the tables turned. John became business partner with Nat. They registered the corporate name, Huth & Frazier, and modernized baking operations, streamlined delivery of bread around town, won prizes for their baked goods at country fairs.

Maybe John’s horses stopped winning races or maybe Helen begged him to quit traveling so much, stay home now that they were expecting a child. Maybe it was the lure of a well-stocked bakery, begging to be expanded into a retail chain. Apricot tarts, pfeffernüsse, raisin biscuits, shortbread, laid out in precise rows. Trays of butter küchen and almond crusted French bread. Layer cakes, custard pies. Stacks of light and dark breads and rolls. Oh, that tantalizing yeasty aroma. Oh, the lusciousness of it all. Oh, the sales potential.

I own all sorts of baking pans. Square, round, sheet, bundt, loaf, mini-muffin, muffin-top, brioche, spring-form, tart. But I have never owned a lady-lock pan. I didn’t know such a thing existed and it didn’t, until Nat Huth invented it in 1914. And with this invention, I realized I didn’t know Nat as well as I thought. But this I know: lady-locks were all the rage, like oysters, at the turn of the century. Fulhorns in German. Puff paste horns filled with sweet buttercream or pie dough horns filled with savory cheeses. This delicacy could be filled with almost anything, if it was finely minced and sauced. I’ll bet Nat would cook up a dozen lady-locks filled with creamed oysters if you asked him.

There was such a demand for lady-locks, he had to invent a new devise to bake them faster. Instead of rolling out rich pastry dough late at night, I figure he was over at the machine works, cutting tin sheets into exact forms, bending them with a forcer, applying solder, the bead of molten metal like thin royal icing flowing over his arthritic fingers, stinging. Tiny bits of sparking metal showering the lard-soaked apron he forgot to take off, so weary, dropping the arc welder, slapping at his apron before it could combust and burnish his wrinkled skin. But someone was there to keep fire watch because soldering is “hot work,” the risk of fire ever-present. Burns, heat stress, heat stroke.

Decades later, folks in Brookville would wander into Uzi’s Pastries on Main Street and ask for buttercream lady-locks, but they were out of luck. Nat was the last baker in town who made them, just across the street at Vienna Bakery. It’s a pizza parlor now. Still standing after all these years. Amazing it never burned down. Baking is hot work. Ovens, stoves, gridirons, broilers. Fired up ten hours a day, spilling out temptation. In those days the walls glistened with butter, the air was cinnamony and Nat’s skinny wrists, protruding from rumpled shirt sleeves, quivered.

Father Huth they called him. When he asked his children and grandchildren to come over, they left their homes straightaway and gathered round the pastry table, eager to taste the latest concoction in his search for culinary goodness. When he won blue ribbons for lofty loaves of bread, I’m sure his wife displayed them in the sales room. When he created a four-tier wedding cake festooned with doves and blossoms, they took his photograph, in batter-smeared apron, next to the cake. And on the day of his funeral, businesses in Brookville closed. In honor of the slumped and inelegant bakerman who made them the staff of life and indulgent confections.

There are a couple of things, not-so-sweet things, Nat didn’t know about. That his son-in-law never did turn Vienna Bakery into a retail chain. That his daughter and a daughter-in-law were hospitalized at the same state hospital for psychosis of an indeterminate nature. That his grandson was a prisoner of war in World War II. That his great, great granddaughter gazed at his photo and laughed at the sight of him. Then she cried as she came to understand what his eyes, droopy and dispirited, had seen. What his mouth, loll and parched, had tasted. His fingers, bent and swollen, had touched.

                             Nathaniel Huth, Proprietor of Vienna Bakery, c. 1910                                Courtesy of Jefferson County History Center, Brookville, PA

Joyce H. Munro’s work can be found in Broad Street Review, NewsWorks, Hippocampus, Minding Nature, The Copperfield Review, Topology, and elsewhere. She writes about the people who kept a Philadelphia estate running during the Gilded Age in “Untold Stories of Compton” on the Morris Arboretum blogsite http://cms.business-services.upenn.edu/morrisarboretum-blog/.

Taylor's Drain

by Joy Weitzel

I look over the ridge and see green. I tell my husband to stop the car so I can take a picture; I want to remember what it looks like from up here. From this view, I see a few vultures floating on wind currents, looking more majestic than they should. I see tree tops and ridges that fall into valleys where patches of light green signal a farm or pasture. I can’t see within the green tree mass that guards the rhododendrons and their tangling pink flowers, the mossy stones that peer out of fallen leaves on the forest floor, or the little stream that trickles over stones but cuts a deep path, every drop running over sandstone to find the Tygart Valley.

I wait for a vision, a time machine to fall from the blue sky with its date set to 1847. If time machines were real and fell from the sky, I would hop in, and, as the lights and whistles spun around me, the mountains would reverse the seasons several times over. The trees would shrink back into the earth, leaving the ridge bare. Loggers would replace the timber with their axes, putting the poplars and birches back in place. Fields would open and close like fish rising, their lips breaking the surface to create ripples. When it all stopped, I would look out from the bald ridge I stand on, and I would search for a sign, something that says “I am here; this is my home. Come see me, and I’ll show you my life.” It would be above a cleared field that you might be plowing at this very moment, pushing the metal and the wood through the dirt. I would walk beside you, while you told me of the journey, the bear you killed last fall, how you know the earth—the technique for sowing and harvesting. You would teach me how to push the plow behind the mule, though I would slip in the dirt as the iron hit stone.

---

A little hill rises on our left, where two deer graze in a green cemetery. They flee when they see us, lifting white tails. As I climb the little hill, I find names—Boehm, Mitchell, Hathaway, Weaver, Proudfoot. The wind and rain have worn the gray markers so some names cannot be read; they stand, lie, or lean bare and blank. By the number of stones with our name, I can tell you have frequented the familiar trail to this place. There is your thirteen-year old son, who died while older sons went to war. There is the daughter who never married. There is your wife of nearly forty years. There is your son who fought in the Civil War, came home, married twice, and died in December.

You are nearby, lying flat beneath the shade of surrounding trees. I brush away wet grass that has settled in your name as if I were brushing away hair from your face. I want to clean you up, remove the dirt that hugs a hand holding a Bible. Though it is just a stone, I sense an odd connection to the damp dirt in which you lie. Your presence dwells in the dates, in the carved hand, in the imprint of your name, in this gray stone lying on its back. The dirt is what I’m supposed talk to because this is what remains: bony fingers, hollow eye sockets, your best Sunday suit. You are earth now, dead and decomposed. But I don’t think about that.

I think about what to say.

I don’t go to cemeteries often. I’ve escorted grandparents, lying in coffins, to their earthly rest, but I never stayed long enough to know their stones. I rarely return. Now I come looking for history.

My fingers touch your marker, deciphering its Scripture. I came here to see you. To see how fast you ran, how you looked at creeks and saw fish hiding in shadowy depths, how you looked at your wife when she was young and when she was old, how your son, Ephraim, climbed up your lap and asked about the bear, how you read the Holy Bible or depended on the farm, on nature and wind.

You chose this place beside the Tygart Valley River for a reason. You looked up and saw timber spread over a half-million mountainous acres. You shook ancestral seeds and scattered them: corn, wheat, oats, barley, soybeans. You might have cleared a few acres for crops, a few for future pasture. Your axe swung to heave your home in place; muscles ripped as the impact of metal reverberated through handle, through narrow wrists and elbows, through a strained bicep and shoulder, through an aching neck that lately had been giving you trouble, and through the skull holding the brain that told you, “good will come.” Your patch of light-green broke the surface, rippled the dark and tangled, and finally grasped the mayfly.

We can’t go back in time to meet with a handshake or a hug. I can’t make your stone speak any more than I can the trees or the ground. All is silent. As my knees become wet with dew and earth, I wonder if I’ve matched you with who I think you are or if you are still a stranger. Then, a woodpecker taps the telephone poles and a grouse beats its wings like a motor. We both know these sounds.

This is what I say: I am your fourth great granddaughter. I have a heart for Great Lakes, and I’m good in a kayak and on skis. When I go, I like to go farther, to the very end, so I can see mountaintops colored with fall and winter’s blanket backed by Lake Superior. I’ve been taught these things like you’ve been taught by your father, and now I’ve completed the circle to see that part of me is here—in this cemetery called Taylor’s Drain.

Joy Weitzel teaches composition in Cadillac, Michigan. She received her MA in English from Northern Michigan University in 2014 and completed a creative non-fiction thesis that explored the history of her family. A wanna-be genealogist, Joy is currently working on finding her roots and expressing them lyrically. Her work has been previously published in the Rappahannock Review.

Set in Stone

by Cathy Warner

The old stone wall bordering the street had long reminded me of the English countryside, stretching as it does, nearly a thousand feet along the road. Above it extends a gentle slope green with bracken fern and full sun in our otherwise heavily wooded mountain town. I had walked to this property often from the local library and dreamed of flapping a blanket under the giant Live Oak like others who had used the land illicitly until old Mildred Johnson died. A granddaughter of homesteader John Bonebrake—who’d once owned a hardware store in Oklahoma and travelled west, settling in this lumber town in the San Lorenzo Valley with his wife Elvina—Mildred, was the last of three spinster sisters to call the place home.  

Without an heir, the property—one of the first settled in Boulder Creek, California—left the family for the first time in over one hundred years. Four acres of pear and walnut trees, a prolific persimmon, a creek, and farmhouse on one side of the road, redwood groves, sandy expanses, and seven spacious acres with rock-terraced hillside on the other, were deeded to the Historical Society and Park and Recreation District, jointly.

The agencies, unable to agree on whether to build a museum or a park, decided to sell, and my once innocent desire to picnic on the knoll swelled like ripe persimmons to full-fledged longing. I lived nearby at the bottom of a sunless ridge, runoff flooding our basement and septic tank most winters. My neighbors were living in their own derelict states: one about to be arrested for child abuse, drug dealing, and tax evasion, the other camped in a trailer while his house, a burned out shell, yawned behind him. I was home all day with my children. We needed out.

My fellow townsfolk were abuzz with offer talk, and I expected tight competition, but our full-priced offer was the only one made. Perhaps the others felt as I had—unworthy of this land, inadequate in light of its history. And yet it became mine.

Walter Remus Swain Rock Walls

Not until my husband and I signed escrow papers for our claim to this part of Swain’s Addition to Boulder Creek, did we learn that the five-acre hillside overgrown with brush was terraced to the top with stone walls, as evidenced in the Historical Society’s 1880s photo. The picture depicted twenty-nine terraced rock walls on an otherwise bare hillside, and a small man, probably Remus Swain himself, wearing a large hat and sitting halfway to the top of the ridge, dwarfed by the rock-scape.

To prevent the house we built from damage by runaway boulders, the County geologist required us to install a heavy-gauge fence with twinned cables extending out twenty feet and posts anchored ten feet deep, with a sign reading: “Rock Barrier Fence May Not Be Removed & Must Be Maintained.” 

But these walls, made of individually stacked stones placed without mortar, had survived two devastating earthquakes: the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. The Loma Prieta struck one afternoon while I stood on a friend’s deck, holding my toddler, while her daughter turned cartwheels, until the ground began heaving in waves before us, the epicenter a scant few miles away. Ten homes were destroyed in my old neighborhood two miles from these sturdy walls.

Warner home under construction: terrace walls

Exploring my new backyard terraces, I found a sandstone monolith engraved with graffiti, modern day petroglyphs carved by hikers and campers on their way to Big Basin State Park. My fingers slid over the roughly etched names and an eye inside a triangle. I discovered charred fire-pits ringed with empty cans of beans and beer, moldered tents and sleeping bags, decomposing clothes. The day the bulldozer came to dig our foundation a homeless man emerged from a redwood grove roused from sleep by the noise.

How many men had these stubborn walls and overgrowth of eucalyptus, juniper, and Scotch broom sheltered over the years, and where would they go to pitch tents away from prying eyes?

Remus Swain was the first settler to make his home here. He pushed east with others from Santa Cruz into the forest. They forged wagon trails along the San Lorenzo River into big stands of Coast Redwoods, and cut the giants to stumps, paving the way for hard-working, hard-drinking men and the scattered towns that followed: Felton, Bonny Doon, Ben Lomond, Lorenzo, Boulder Creek.

Swain owned a sawmill, and my hillside isn’t the only one he denuded. Of course, he didn’t do it alone, Swain hired loggers, muscled and rowdy, and who kept the sixteen taverns and brothels in Boulder Creek in business. The Sequoia sempervirens—alive since the time of Christ—were two hundred feet tall with circumferences big as dance floors when they were felled, chopped, milled, hewn into boards, and freighted to San Francisco by rail to build houses and stores. Swain, and others like him, became rich, until the lumber ran out.

The redwoods are second and third growth now, but the stone walls are original. One lines the street, and another twenty-nine snake across the mountain flank. Nearly a thousand feet in length, they terrace five acres. Each piece of granite and Zayante sandstone was carried, stacked, and fitted into place, one at a time. Between the walls, which are roughly ten feet apart, the dirt was tamped flat and planted with eucalyptus trees and shrubs according to the nursery receipt in the Historical Society archives.

It’s undocumented but asserted in the area’s slight historical volumes, that the hands building these walls belonged to the Chinese who made their way to the greater Monterey Bay to build railroads that chugged lumber and other necessities through the treacherous Santa Cruz mountains—where dynamiting tunnels proved deadly—to the Santa Clara Valley and beyond. Some of these industrious men (how many, I have no idea), living in camps segregated from the Europeans, were diverted to the more domestic and aesthetically pleasing task of shoring up my mountainside.

After years of laboring in this yard myself, sweating and swaying in the summer heat as I planted flowers and harvested vegetables—I thought of those men as more than historical trivia: men with bruised legs as they hefted boulders, bloodied fingers as their gloves wore through, throats scratched dry with dust and grit accumulating in their water buckets. I thought of their long trek to the creek in the afternoon swelter. I imagined their cooking fires in the terrace now occupied by my house, swimming pool, and garden. Could they imagine their toil on this naked hillside would one day anchor living quarters so enchanting and comfortable?

Near dusk one August day, after I watered my potted roses, I pulled weeds near the for sale sign we had erected and wondered who would buy this land from us as we planned a reluctant departure from our dream home. An economic recession had drained our resources, just as the lumber had run out for Remus Swain and labor demands elsewhere carried the Chinese workers away. Would the new owners care at all about its history, about Remus Swain, the Bonebrakes, Mildred Johnson, or the Chinese laborers who built these walls?

Hawks glided overhead on thermal currents, the sun slipped low. That evening bats circled, feasting on mosquitoes as dark fell and an owl called. I slipped into the hot tub, a modern luxury, steam rising off my body like fog, and watched meteors from the Perseid shower streak across the sky. I imagined a dozen braided Chinese men, cracked hands laced together behind their heads while they stretched out on wool blankets in this exact spot looking heavenward at a similar sight 120 years ago. Was it too late to thank them? For surely they paid the price for my desire.

Cathy Warner moved from her historic California property to Puget Sound, where she writes, edits, blogs, leads workshops, and renovates homes with her husband. Cathy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University and has authored a poetry volume Burnt Offerings. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in dozens of literary journals and anthologies. Visit her website.

Chasing the Dead

by Susan E. Lindsey

I kneel in the damp sod in front of Lydia’s lichen-covered gravestone. It’s a chilly October day in southeastern Kansas. The wind scatters white clouds across a cornflower blue sky. Dry oak leaves skitter through the graveyard and collect by the thirty or so gravestones.

I press my palms against the soil covering Lydia. I’m not sure what I expect to feel—surely not a pulse. Lydia’s heart stopped beating more than 140 years earlier. I had been haunted by dreams of her for months.

I’m an amateur genealogist; we live for these moments. Call us crazy (many do), but there’s something fascinating about chasing the dead.

Lydia died at the age of eighteen while giving birth to her first child. Her baby boy survived his mother by only a few months. Lydia’s husband was my great-great grandfather, David Lindsey.

“Alas, she hath left us, and we mourn our loss,” the inscription reads.

Just to the left of Lydia’s stone is a similar gravestone. David’s second wife, Sarah Sophia, lies beneath it. The two arched stones look alike—made from the same material, inscribed in a similar style, and each has a weeping willow at the top. A small lamb lies beneath the willow tree on Sarah’s stone—symbolizing the baby boy buried with her. She, too, died in childbirth. My great-great grandfather had three sons; only Sarah’s older boy survived.

The two women didn’t know one another in life, but spend eternity next to each other in this small family cemetery, a speck in the midst of rolling farmland.

Mine is a sometimes gruesome hobby. I spend hours in old cemeteries, dim basement archives, old county courthouses, and historic battlefields. I am caught up in lives long passed. I admire their courage. I’m touched by their tragedies and moved by their grace.

I feel as though I almost know them, that I understand something of their lives, joys, sorrows, and passions. They have become more than dates and names.

Lydia’s story haunted me. By the time she married David, she was an orphan. She had lost both of her parents, two sisters, and a brother in less than six months. I’ve never learned why—maybe one of the countless diseases of the past swept them away.

She married David when she was seventeen. Exactly ten months after their wedding, she died in childbirth. After I found her grave, placed yellow grocery store roses on it, and whispered a prayer, my dreams about her stopped.

Others now take Lydia’s place in my thoughts and dreams and haunt me. They are my direct and not-so-direct ancestors, and their neighbors and friends.

There’s James, who packed up his wife and family, and moved from Kentucky to Illinois twenty-seven years before the Civil War because he was determined that his children would be raised in a state free of slavery. Most of his relatives remained in Kentucky and continued to own other human beings.

Jane, his wife, had courage and strength of her own. She gave birth for the first time just ten months after her marriage, and for the next twenty-one years, she had a new baby on an average of one every twenty months—twelve children in all. She raised all of them to adulthood, an extraordinary feat in an era when half of all children died before they were grown.

James and Jane had a good friend named Ben. He also opposed slavery even though he was a slaveholder. But after living and working in New Orleans, Ben wanted no part of slavery. He spent the next few years educating his slaves to ensure they were literate. He then freed all of them and paid for their passage on a ship to Liberia, Africa. Ben’s involvement didn’t stop when his former slaves boarded the ship. For fifteen years, letters to and from the freed slaves and their former master crossed the Atlantic. Some of the letters still exist; I’ve held and read these yellowing pages.

There’s William, Ben’s brother-in-law. He lost his father when he was only five and his mother when he was eighteen. He and his wife had eleven children and William, a preacher, buried nine of them. He unknowingly brought home cholera after a trip. He survived the disease, but his wife and two of his sons did not. He struggled with guilt, tragedy, and debt the rest of his life.

I didn’t descend from powerful or famous people. My ancestors were mostly preachers and teachers and farmers.

My family’s history is entwined with the nation’s history. My grandfather pursued Poncho Villa. My great-great grandfather helped Kansas join the Union as a free state. My great-aunt served as a nurse at a first aid station at the Chicago World’s Fair. My paternal grandmother could shoot the head off of a chicken from across the barnyard. My maternal grandmother made exquisite bridal gowns. Her great-aunt was murdered by Plains Indians. My father, when he was just a teenager, helped get Pretty Boy Floyd’s car out of a ditch.

Some of my friends are researching their families. I hear their stories, too: the great-grandfather who, while drunk, smothered his own crying child; the woman with talent too big for her small town, who left her husband to embark on a stage career in New York and European capitals; and the father who walked across the frozen Ohio River to bring home Christmas gifts for his children.

These people were real. They lived through tornadoes, blizzards, drought, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, wars, and famine. They fell in love, married, had children, and buried loved ones. They made good choices and bad ones. They were human.

There’s no soap opera more compelling than these very real lives. Their stories should be remembered—these people helped shape our nation and literally brought us into being. But we also learn lessons from their lives about the nature of true sacrifice, and about honor, hard work, conviction, and courage. I complain less about trivial annoyances in my own life when I recall the very real challenges they faced.

So I continue to chase the dead, coaxing stories out of old documents, and trying to bring long-forgotten lives back into view.

"Chasing the Dead" received honorable mention in our spring essay contest.

Susan E. Lindsey fell in love with words in the second grade while reading The Wizard of Oz. After a nearly 20-year career in corporate communication and public relations, she now leads a much happier life as a writer, professional editor, and speaker. Her essays, short stories, and articles have been published in various newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. Susan earned a degree in communication at Pacific Lutheran University. A member of three writing groups and numerous historical and genealogical societies, she is completing work on a nonfiction manuscript.