All the Wild Hungers by Karen Babine

Author:Karen Babine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2018-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

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THE BACK OF THE line was a bad place to be on Potluck Sunday at Bethany Lutheran Church in Nevis, because even though my grandmother Phyllis would have made two batches of rice pudding—risgrynsgröt—you still might not get any. If you asked, she would share the recipe, but she would tell you, to make it right, Don’t rush it and don’t try to substitute ingredients. If you were lucky enough to get one of her pies at a church bake sale before they sold out, she would tell you that she never made a pie until after she married—and the trick to a flaky crust is cold shortening and cold water. She never used butter or lard in her pies, just shortening, believing in not messing with something that worked. My grandmother’s faith was rock solid. She believed in chocolate-chip-cookie care packages and the Minnesota Twins, the Bible and Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of North America. Even now, with flurries in the cold Christmas darkness where my grandmother is gone and her only child has been driven into a hospital bed by chemotherapy, I hear my grandmother’s voice whispering James Russell Lowell’s “The First Snowfall”:

The snow had begun in the gloaming,

And busily all the night

Had been heaping field and highway

With a silence deep and white….

We spend a snowy Christmas Eve in the hospital in a special room for the immunocompromised, and we are all more than a little frightened because my mother has just begun her chemotherapy and cannot manage to stay out of the hospital. I whisper as much of Lowell as I can remember—not usually more than the first two stanzas—and once, when I’d read the entire poem, I stopped with his grief at the end, and vowed just to enjoy the beginning of the poem from now on.

We gather in the waiting room, spreading sparkling juice and store-bought lefse on the table. We wear Santa hats and paste on smiles for my small niece and nephew, my mother wearing a Santa hat to keep her hair from falling out into her eyes, catching on her lips. Her hair is falling out now these short weeks into chemotherapy, layers of filaments on her pillow. But it is not that simple: losing her hair is physically painful, her scalp itself angry and tender against knitted hats. Even this, something that seems passive, hurts more than the soul. Days later, I make rice pudding for our rescheduled Christmas dinner and my mother eats it, the first real food she has eaten in days and I wonder about the miracle of it, that she is eating, that she is eating this particular food. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.

Just last week, a family friend told a story about her father, who had come to Minnesota from Sweden when he was a small boy. My grandmother found him a kindred spirit. Toward the end of his life, there was a time when he refused to eat and the doctors started talking about a feeding tube to keep him alive.

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