THE PARLOR is a new series on The Milk House that embraces the lighter side of rural life. You can find a new piece by a different author the first Saturday of every month.
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I remember meeting for the first time Deb’s grandmother, a woman with the size to back up a cast iron skillet, hard as Sawyer’s Ridge, eyes set deep as a coal shaft, didn’t tolerate Tom Fools, judged a man by his appetite and the callouses on his hands.
I had the callouses, all right, but not the gumption to tell her I got them from curling dumbbells.
At the dinner table, I thought she asked me if I liked “yams.” I said, “Oh, heck yeah, give me a plateful.” Turned out she said “ramps.” She brought out a mountain-man-sized platter of them. Smelled like something steeped seven days in hand-me-down boxer shorts.
Mee-maw standing over me, quite quiet, I ate those steamy, sloppy, greasy, gooey, bulby things like I had callouses on my stomach. My craw didn’t sit right for the rest of the evening.
The next day, I wondered why they called that so-called root vegetable ramps and not something like hillbilly hand grenades or tummy time bombs. What Mee-maw said sat a short spell from the farmhouse, growing in a bunch of the foulest funk this side of Hell. They grew wild in the holler on both sides of the creek down from a hillside so steep a man would need a four-wheeler, a steel cable winch and a cement incline to climb back up.
Mee-maw handed me a galvanized pail and said that I could put to use the four limbs and the lick of common sense the good Lord gave me. I must have given her the same look I did when I first smelled that platter of ramps, and she shot me a look suggesting this college boy didn’t have enough common sense to be a mannikin.
There is a whole lot of difference between living off the land and landing on the land. I started to step down the slope and was flat on my rump amongst the ramps in about two seconds flat. I gathered the bucket after wiping my dented rear-end with the back of the uncalloused side of my hand and commenced gathering a mess of ramps. They had a broad leaf above their stem, confirming my original impression of ramps: that they would be best suited in the outhouse as emergency toilet paper.
All the while I’m ramping, Deb’s grandma is staring down at me, bellowing instructions on how to pick this should-be mold properly so it can be harvested for years to come. And this college boy is learning a few things they don’t teach you up at State, most importantly, a man doesn’t have enough hands to please this kind of woman. I was down there, digging up those wretched roots while trying to dig up a proper, creative, courteous excuse to not eat them that night like it was against my religion to eat root vegetables more than once a week or that we should donate the whole mess to science to create a super antibiotic.
But something deep down inside my gullet told me that maybe Mee-maw had something meaner perched inside her cold cellar, and maybe, just maybe, I could build up a tolerance for ramps as I did for 3.2 beer and campus coffee. So I got down to the business of collecting ramps and later my composure at the dinner table long enough to settle the score with Deb’s grandmother even if my stomach didn’t settle for another couple of days.
I figured out that Mee-maw probably figured with her serving me something smelly every day there wouldn’t be any Tom Fool fooling around with her oldest granddaughter.
Just goes to show, old folks don’t know everything.
Learn more about Roberty on our Contributors’ Page.
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(Photo: Mr. Nixter/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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Introducing the 2023 Best in Rural Writing Contest. $300 in prizes, as well as great exposure for shortlisted authors. Deadline: September 30th, 2023. For more details go here.
We’re grateful to partner with AcresUSA, who is North America’s oldest publisher on production-scale organic and regenerative farming. AcresUSA regularly organizes events to benefit farmers and ranchers who are actively improving soil health, agronomists breaking new ground in soil and plant science, and livestock managers cultivating holistic systems. Browse their events page to see what they have planned for 2023.
- THE PARLOR: Ramps by Robert E. Petras - July 1, 2023
- The Summer of Snakes by Robert E. Petras - September 29, 2022