Pickling spice.
It is becoming more likely that I will never stain my fingertips with Grandma Lucy’s pickled beets again.
*
The summer Grandma moved with Papa John to the senior living complex at Orchard Path was the same summer I moved across the Atlantic to join Joe in Brussels after we were married.
We talked about it often then — she and I — of the parallels. The grief of leaving. The fear of the unknown. The balancing of sentimentality and practicality as we both sifted and sorted our belongings to figure out what would still serve us and what needed to be purged because it simply wouldn’t fit. The exhaustion.
There was something comforting and even comical about convincing each other that our new homes would be OK even if neither of us fully believed it. But I suspect both of us felt the weight of where the parallels stopped: my move the first of many, hers the last of few. I was leaving Minnesota to follow my husband around the world to wherever the Foreign Service would send us and she was leaving her home of 55 years to be somewhere with step-up care for the time when Papa would slip further and further away.
*
Pickled beets are an acquired taste that I don’t remember acquiring. As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been a point when I didn’t love the almost sticky sweet, slightly tangy and ever so spicy chunks of soil rubies.
I suppose I should be more specific: I like, but don’t love, all pickled beets. The continuum runs from store-bought to deli to my grandmother’s.
And I suppose that, if one were being persnickety, it would be most accurate to call them “Grandma Alcott’s.” But the fact that the recipe is my great-grandmother’s is a mere technicality. As long as Mom, Brother, and I have fought over who gets the last quarter beet from the jar, the ones I love most have been “Grandma Lucy’s.”
*
After Grandma Alcott died the May that I was twelve, the only thing Mom wanted was the bible with her grandmother’s scrawled annotations and the couple of jars left on the shelves in the cellar. I didn’t understand then that grief doesn’t always come out in tears — sometimes it’s a pie crust filled with the last batch of Palisade peaches put up the summer before.
I knew a bit better by the Christmas a couple years later when Mom’s wish list was short and sweet: a few jars of Grandma Lucy’s beets. And I couldn’t help but notice that one of the gold-ringed mason jars in the flat was filled not with beets but a check that more than covered an unexpected and out-of-budget car repair. By then I had started to understand that, in my family, canned goods are a currency pegged to love.
*
I tried to learn how to make them once. A little over five years ago on the sort of crisp Midwestern fall day that brings everything into sharp focus. Grandma let me borrow one of her aprons and Grandpa stopped tinkering at his basement workbench just long enough to take a milk break with me as the filled jars sat in their steam bath.
I had been drifting for a long while by then and something about the peeling and prepping and waiting had felt deliciously purposeful.
Grandma proclaimed the batch an almost failure. “Out of practice,” she begged, but I was pretty sure she was just being modest. They were the best I had ever had.
*
Next week it’ll have been two years since I packed out of the St. Paul apartment where F. Scott’s ghost came floating across the alley on summer nights when the windows were flung wide open.
It no longer feels like it was “only yesterday” — too much has changed between then and now. But sometimes, when the windows here are flung open and the midsummer’s light is just so, it doesn’t seem so very far away.
And yet.
*
We mostly talk about Nicolas and Papa when I call her. We don’t have to call attention to them — the parallels — we simply share the joys and frustrations of taking care of an almost-three-month-old boy and an 87-year-old man who’s more frequently slipping into somewhen these days. Usually we just share a knowing laugh or two and try to forget that there’s an ocean and a pandemic between us.
*
The market opened again a few weeks ago. I haven’t stopped to look to see if the farmers have any beets.
