Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

174 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Debra Gwartney
topped with Mamie’s chokecherry syrup, he let me drive downtown
with him, where he set me on his shoulders to walk through the charred
remains of the bar and into the Recorder-Herald offices. Although the
newspaper production room smelled smoky and made my eyes sting,
nothing had burned, not the press, not the cardboard bucket of flaky
soap. Grandpa put me on the floor, popped a sugar cube in my mouth
before he plunked one in his coffee, then he set the headline that would
announce the fire.
After he died, my mother and I (again without discussion) both
knew Mamie wouldn’t recover. Grandpa Ron had kept her together
with a practicality he’d learned growing up on his Swedish family’s
Idaho potato farm along with three beefy brothers and two sisters
named Betty and Jo, sturdy women who had large hands for kneading
dough and pitching hay. The brothers were gone, one after another, my
grandfather the last. Each had a fatal heart attack at age sixty-four.
Grandpa was dead and Mamie was lost and my mother looked
every minute as if no one could understand what had disappeared
from her. She’d traveled every spring to the cemetery in Southern
Idaho to tend the wild rose bushes planted on the humped soil of
her sister’s and brothers’ grave, near the headstone that said “Budded
on earth to bloom in heaven.” My mom pressed tulip and daffodil
bulbs in the dirt and spread lobelia seed, but no matter how many got
planted, they never drew out the smallest sign from a sibling. And
now it would be worse, her father gone silent, too. Who would my
mother lean on when she was exhausted by loneliness and grief?
One fall when I was maybe ten years old, my grandparents
stopped to visit us, as they normally did, on their way to Arizona
for the winter. Sometime during that week, Mamie decided to make
her family’s Dutch recipe for chicken and noodles. She spent the
afternoon with her hands in flour and egg, mixing dough the color
of butter. Rolling it out, a neat rectangle, she cut long ribbons that
she dunked into boiling water before adding their wilted lengths to
a steaming pot of chicken and vegetables. The hair around her face
curled and absorbed the scent of rosemary that she’d rubbed together
in her palms.
My brothers and sisters and I were products of the 1970s—
accustomed to SpaghettiOs out of the can and frozen corn dogs; my
mother was a woman of the same era, eager to try out the latest flavors