Here on Lake Hallie by Patti See

Author:Patti See
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press

How We Spend Our Days

The See family, circa 1934, including the author’s father (in overalls with his mother’s hand on his shoulder). COURTESY OF PATTI SEE

Family Delicacy

One night when I visit Dad, he’s got Mom’s cookbooks laid out on the table.

“What are you looking for?” I ask. He became quite the cook after my mom got sick and he had to take over her jobs in their home: cooking, cleaning, laundry. He experimented with chili until he perfected his recipe. He even made popovers a few times. And he often looked for new recipes to try. In many ways, he took his fix-it-guy knack for making something new out of repurposed parts in his garage and adapted it to the kitchen. Some of his dishes—bologna with noodles comes to mind—were the culinary equivalent of his once making a cribbage board out of a toilet seat.

“Well, I tell you what,” he says. “Someone brought me a whole squirrel and I gotta figure out how to cook it.” He’s got the cleaned squirrel carcass in a Ziploc bag on his kitchen counter.

As a girl, I often tagged along when my dad and brothers went squirrel hunting. I always believed that eventually one of them would let me shoot a gun. It never happened. My job was carrying the dead squirrels, which had usually been dropped inside a Wonder Bread bag. I still recall walking through the woods on cold November afternoons with warm dead squirrels brushing against my thigh. Once the squirrels were cleaned, I’m sure I played with the tails—some still with a bloody nub of tailbone attached. At least one of my brothers drove around town with a squirrel tail on his car antenna. We weren’t really rednecks, though I realize these squirrely memories of mine don’t support that claim. My only explanation is that this was the 1970s in small-town Wisconsin.

Each winter, Mom and Dad had a squirrel feed for neighbors and friends. I’ve never figured out if squirrels are difficult to clean or if they were just cleaned sloppily by my dad and brothers. In any case, as all of us ate tiny squirrel legs or the larger rib meat, we’d pull brown or gray squirrel hair out of our mouths. My mom often put a few “hair plates” on the table, so after we tugged squirrel hair from our teeth, we could deposit it on a separate plate. Was it too gross to put squirrel hair on your own dinner plate? It falls into the category of Stuff I Did in Childhood and Never Questioned Why, like getting clean in the same bathwater other siblings had just used or arguing with family members over who would get to eat the chicken butt—the fattiest part that went over the fence last. It sounded better than it was.

I look at this squirrel on my dad’s counter and see that perhaps it is impossible to get all of the hair off of a skinned squirrel. The squirrel lies in a plastic bag, headless and pawless, like a backwoods mob victim.

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