Recollections of hometown neighborhood rides in on the scent of a blooming lilac.
I’m sitting on the couch in my living room, the doors and windows open to the night air. There’s a slight aroma of lilacs drifting in from the backyard. We have a hedge row of lilac bushes along the fence that separates our house from the place next door and some years the bushes are thick with purple flowers and the perfume is heavy in its sweetness, overwhelming, almost dizzying. Tonight, the blossoms are not yet fully opened so the scent of springtime is still gentle and caressing. It rode in on the more assertive scent of fresh-cut grass, ubiquitous now that neighborhood lawns have shed their winter wearies.
They used to call Fort Collins “the lilac city.” When I was a kid in this town, lilac bushes were everywhere, in everyone’s yard, in spectacular, fragrant frequency. Some of those bushes survive or have been replaced with newer, hardier generations. Some, like our backyard hedge, have platted their own strip of earth. Most, I suppose, are long gone. There are still a lot of lilacs in Fort Collins, but the nickname is no longer apt.
We had a hedge in the yard of our childhood home, but it wasn’t lilacs. We lived on a corner lot in a tri-level house with an apple-green door in a neighborhood populated mostly by university people. My dad was a writer/editor for the Extension Service; the man who lived behind us was a veterinarian affiliated with the teaching hospital; the man across the street was an atmospheric scientist who went on to some international acclaim. Most of the mother’s stayed home. And there were lots of kids.
Most of the breadwinners in the neighborhood were just starting out in nascent careers and most of them stayed only until a tenure-track position opened up somewhere else, so there was always a new family, a new kid, a new good-bye. I remember having a revolving cast of best friends:
Molly Rice, the veterinarian’s daughter, was my first BFF. She had an older sister, Mary Katherine, and a younger brother, curly-haired Danny, and our mothers became close. One year, they spent Christmas with us and all three of us girls got beautiful Furga dolls from Santa. (Santa must have thought my sister, nearly five years older than me, was too cool for dolls because she didn’t get one. Mine, a doll with red hair and ringlets and a yellow lace dress, is now in a box under the house, her head in a plastic bag so her fancy hair doesn’t get messed up.) They moved to Broomfield after a couple of years; and although we saw them occasionally and my younger brother and I got to take a Greyhound to spend a weekend with them — all by ourselves! — I was soon on the hunt for a new best friend.
Enter Sarah Mail. She lived all the way at the end of the block, in a tri-level with a front porch, with her brothers Shad and Steel, one older, one younger, I can’t remember anymore which was which. Her mother was divorced, an interesting and scandalous reality I didn‘t quite know how to process, and Sarah and her brothers had latch-key kid rules that seemed strange: come straight home, no phone calls until mom gets home, only play at certain houses. Ours was one of those houses. I loved Sarah Mail and was devastated when her mother decided it was time to move on. She let Sarah telephone me a couple times from their new home, long distance so it cost money, a kitchen timer ticking away the five-minute gift.
After Sarah Mail, there was DeeDee Valdez. Her mother was working on husband No. 3, making DeeDee Valdez DeeDee Valdez Warner Wallace (or something like that) the summer before my family left Fort Collins. I don’t want to say that DeeDee was my default best friend, but she kind of was, being the last girl my age in the neighborhood. But she was exciting and fun. We used to make full-skirted dolls out of hollyhocks, another flower that was plentiful in my childhood neighborhood but is somehow nearly nonexistent in today’s Fort Collins, and we would design mansions out of grass clippings left behind after my dad mowed the lawn. We wrote plays in her basement bedroom, spending hours planning and writing and rewriting. We dreamed about a stage and all the tickets we would sell, but we never performed them, content with our shared creativity. Our friendship, although important in its moment, was short-lived and not strong enough to withstand my family’s move to Colorado Springs. When we moved, two months into my fifth grade year, I said good-bye to DeeDee and left her to find a new bestie.
Of course, I had other friends, girls who were in my class at Moore Elementary or in my Sunday School class, girls who lived on the next block over or across a busy street. I remember one night, angry at my mother about some forgotten infraction, “running away” to the home of Jerilynn Chelton. Her dad owned a shoe store downtown and each year just before school started we would go to the store on College and Laurel for a new pair of shoes. That night I packed the whicker basket on the front of my purple secondhand bicycle with all my most treasured possessions — my Furga doll, a stuffed dog that my grandmother gave me and a notebook (there’s always been a notebook) — and rode down the street, past DeeDee Valdez’s house, past Sarah Mail’s former house, across the big street but not the busy street, into a neighboring neighborhood. When I got to Jerilynn’s house, she was out in the front yard and she said something like, “I’m surprised your mom let you come over here.” I told her I was running away and she was unimpressed. We played together for a little while; and when it started getting dark, I went home.
My mom told me, some years later, that she never even knew I ran away that evening, which seems kind of sad and disappointing. But kind of hilarious too.
That neighborhood is still connected to the university, but most professionals have moved east to bigger houses, newer neighborhoods, leaving those old homes to find a different purpose. They are now mostly student rentals. Where kids once grew and blossomed along with the lilac bushes, college students now figure out how to be adults and good neighbors.
It’s a natural progression, I guess, and in a thriving city, right somehow. And yet, a little bit sad — like the last blossom or losing a best friend
The Pie
Rhubarb, along with lilacs and hollyhocks, was a ubiquitous plant in the yards of my childhood. Even if I didn’t know it at the time, stories about the plentiful harvests underscored the fact. We grew it in every house and city we lived in — Salida, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs. Even this house, when my dad was younger and more interested in gardening. We had a plant in the backyard on the edge of the vegetable garden that was, by turns, huge and varied or shrinking and tomatoes only. One day my brother, thinking he was doing my dad a huge favor, offered to mow the lawn and then mowed over the rhubarb plant. He didn’t kill it, but it was definitely on life support for a few years. When it came back, I thought it was a weed growing out of control in the by then mostly abandoned garden. I sprayed it with some herbicide meant to get rid of dandelions and bindweed. Now we don’t have rhubarb growing in our yard. I think this weekend though I’ll buy a plant and start anew. Because there’s always reason for rhubarb pie.
The Recipe
RHUBARB CHESS PIE
1 single-crust pie pastry
2 cups 1-inch thick rhubarb slices
1¼ cup granulated sugar
4 eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup heavy cream
¼ cup butter, melted
¼ cup lemon juice
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon cornmeal
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ teaspoon salt
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Prepare pie crust and put in pie plate. Line pastry with double thickness of foil. Blind bake 8 minutes. Remove foil. Bake another 6 minutes. Meanwhile, arranged rhubarb slices on a baking sheet. Bake alongside the pastry for 10 minutes. Remove from oven; cool. Sprinkle with ¼ cup of the sugar; toss to coat. Transfer to the baked
crust and set aside.
In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, 1 cup sugar, cream, butter, lemon juice, cornstarch, cornmeal, vanilla and ¼ teaspoon salt. Pour slowly over rhubarb in the crust. (If the rhubarb migrates to the sides of the crust, move them so they are evenly spaced and all parts of the pie gets rhubarb.) Bake 40-50 minutes, until center is set, covering loosely with foil the last 10 minutes of baking.
Cool on a wire rack for 2 hour. Cover; chill at least 3 hours and up to 24 hours.
Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.
Commentaires